Improved landslide susceptibility mapping using unsupervised and supervised collaborative machine learning models

Datasets containing recorded landslide and non-landslide samples can greatly influence the performance of machine learning (ML) models, which are commonly used in landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM). However, the non-landslide samples cannot be directly obtained. In this study, a pattern-based approach is proposed to improve the LSM process, constructing unsupervised machine learning (UML) – supervised machine learning (SML) collaborative models in which the non-landslide samples can be reasonably selected. Two UML models, the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and K-means, are introduced to sample the non-landslide datasets with four sampling selections (abbreviated as A, B, C and D, respectively). Then non-landslide patterns recognised by the UML models are learned by the random forest (RF). A new sensitivity index, accuracy improvement ratio (AIR), is defined to evaluate the superiority of these sampling selections. Compared with the GMM-RF model, the K-means-RF model is more capable of recognising non-landslide patterns and providing sufficient and reliable non-landslide samples. The sampling selection A of the K-means-RF with an AIR value of 2.3 is regarded as the best selection. The results indicate that the UML-SML model based on the pattern-based approach offers an effective strategy to find the non-landslide samples and has a better solution to the LSM.