A comparative study of landslide susceptibility maps produced using support vector machine with different kernel functions and entropy data mining models in China

The main aim of this study was to apply and compare two GIS-based data mining models, namely support vector machine (SVM) by four kernel functions (linear-SVM, polynomial-SVM, radial basic function-SVM, and sigmoidal-SVM) and entropy models in landslide susceptibility mapping, in Shangzhou District, China. Initially, 145 landslide locations were mapped using early reports, aerial photographs, and supported by field surveys. Subsequently, landslides in the study area were divided randomly into training and validation datasets (70/30) using ArcGIS 10.0 software. In the current study, 14 landslide conditioning factors, namely, slope aspect, slope angle, profile curvature, plan curvature, altitude, topographic wetness index (TWI), stream power index (SPI), sediment transport index (STI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), distance from roads, distance from rivers, distance from faults, rainfall, and lithology, were exploited to detect the most susceptible areas. In the next step, landslide susceptibility maps generated by four types of SVM or entropy models were produced. Finally, validation of the landslide susceptibility maps produced by different models was evaluated using receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves. The results showed that the entropy model exhibited the highest success rate (0.7610), followed by polynomial-SVM (0.7526), the sigmoidal-SVM (0.7518), radial basic function-SVM (0.7446), and linear-SVM (0.7390) models. Similarly, the ROC plots also showed that the prediction rates gave almost similar results. The entropy model had the highest prediction rate (0.7599), followed by polynomial-SVM (0.7259), sigmoidal-SVM (0.7203), radial basic function-SVM (0.7149), and linear-SVM (0.7009) models. Hence, it can be concluded that the five models used in this study gave close results, with the entropy model exhibiting best performance in landslide susceptibility mapping.