Application of the group method of data handling (GMDH) approach for travel distance prediction of landslides

Landslides have claimed many lives and caused significant economic losses in recent years. Therefore, assessing the potential risk for landslide hazard prevention and mitigation is vital and the landslide travel distance is a key aspect in this process. In this study, the group method of data handling (GMDH) was used to predict the landslide travel distance. A total of 111 landslide datasets collected from the literature were used to construct and validate the proposed GMDH model. Five parameters were selected as the input parameters, including initial slope angle, body height, average body thickness, the logarithm of source volume, and body aspect ratio. The GMDH model was compared with the gene expression programming (GEP) model as well as four empirical models proposed by other researchers. The comparison results demonstrated that the predicted results of the GMDH model agreed well with the measured values, with a correlation coefficient of 0.9123, which was higher than the GEP model and the four empirical models. It was concluded that the proposed GMDH model had great potential in estimating the landslide travel distance.