Seismic landslide susceptibility mapping using machine learning methods: A case study of the 2013 Ms6.6 Min-Zhang earthquake

Seismic landslides are characterized by wide distribution and strong destructiveness. On July 22, 2013, the Min-Zhang earthquake occurred and a large number of casualties and building burying were caused by the geological disasters induced by seismic motion. The present research aims to generate seismic landslides susceptibility prediction maps of Min-Zhang earthquake using different machine learning algorithms, providing reference for disaster prevention and reduction in earthquake-affected areas. Five machine learning algorithms including K Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Naive Bayes (NB), Random Forest (RF), Logistic Regression (LR), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are implemented and the sample dataset was prepared based on the landslide inventory map from open data repository. A total number of 4660 samples containing seismic landslides and non-landslide were collected. The influencing factors of seismic landslide include peak ground acceleration (PGA), epicenter distance, elevation, slope, aspect, plan curvature, profile curvature, fault distance, river distance, and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The performance of five target machine learning algorithms is evaluated and compared using determination coefficient R2 and AUC value of ROC curve. The results indicate that the RF and SVM model have more accurate prediction ability with higher AUC value reaching 0.999 and 0.998, respectively, and the NR model has relatively poor performance resulting from the potential correlation of various influencing factors. Finally, the seismic landslide susceptibility of the Min-Zhang earthquake was mapped using the five trained models and it could offer useful information for seismic hazard management in the future.