Integration of SBAS-InSAR and RFE-RF-XGBoost for Landslide Vulnerability Assessment: A Case Study in Zhaotong City, Yongshan County

Yongshan County in northeastern Yunnan Province is a frequent geological hazard zone. Based on previous detailed geological hazard surveys, the county contains 455 landslide hazard sites, primarily distributed in the western and northern regions. Influenced by multiple factors including rainfall, earthquakes, human activities, and reservoir water storage, it is challenging to evaluate their development using a single indicator. Therefore, there is an urgent need to conduct landslide susceptibility assessments that integrate deformation rate characteristics. However, existing studies in this region have only considered static spatial factors such as slope aspect, elevation, and lithology. Traditional landslide susceptibility assessments often struggle to balance zoning accuracy with timeliness, leading to biased results and limited update efficiency. This study employs SBAS-InSAR technology to capture surface deformation rates and utilizes machine learning models to partition landslide susceptibility distribution maps. It innovatively introduces an RFE-RF-XGBoost model to reduce partitioning errors and enhance the accuracy of landslide susceptibility mapping. Experiments utilized 147 Sentinel-1A and 14 LT-1 scenes. Through five-fold cross-validation, 13 influencing factors were selected. The RFE-RF-XGBoost model was trained via hyperparameter optimization and compared against four conventional models (CatBoost, LightGBM, XGBoost, RF). After validating the predictive performance of different models via ROC curves, the prediction results at each level were analyzed using Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1 metrics. Results indicate that all five machine learning models demonstrate effective zoning capabilities. Among them, the RFE-RF-XGBoost model achieves optimal mapping performance. Compared to the other four models, it reduces the proportion of low-risk zones by 2–4% while increasing the proportion of extremely high-risk zones by approximately 2–12%, with an AUC value reaching around 0.95. Field investigations further validated that this approach enhances landslide interpretation accuracy by integrating SBAS-InSAR technology with remote sensing techniques.