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Landslides are a dangerous natural hazard that can critically harm road infrastructure in mountainous places, resulting in significant damage and fatalities. The primary purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of three machine learning algorithms (MLAs) for landslide susceptibility mapping including random forest (RF), decision tree (DT), and support vector machine (SVM). We selected a case study region that is frequently affected by landslides, the important Kamyaran–Sarvabad road in the Kurdistan province of Iran. Altogether, 14 landslide evaluation factors were input into the MLAs including slope, aspect, elevation, river density, distance to river, distance to fault, fault density, distance to road, road density, land use, slope curvature, lithology, stream power index (SPI), and topographic wetness index (TWI). We identified 64 locations of landslides by field survey of which 70% were randomly employed for building and training the three MLAs while the remaining locations were used for validation. The area under the receiver operating characteristics (AUC) reached a value of 0.94 for the decision tree compared to 0.82 for the random forest, and 0.75 for support vector machines model. Thus, the decision tree model was most accurate in identifying the areas at risk for future landslides. The obtained results may inform geoscientists and those in decision-making roles for landslide management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We used remote sensing techniques and machine learning to detect and map landslides, and landslide susceptibility in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. We located 152 landslides using a combination of interferometry synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), Google Earth (GE), and field surveys. Of the total slide locations, 80% (122 landslides) were utilized for training the selected algorithms, and the remaining 20% (30 landslides) were applied for validation purposes. We employed 17 conditioning factors, including slope angle, aspect, elevation, curvature, profile curvature, stream power index (SPI), topographic wetness index (TWI), lithology, soil type, land cover, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), distance to river, distance to fault, distance to road, river density, fault density, and road density, which were produced from satellite imageries, geological map, soil maps, and a digital elevation model (DEM). We used these factors to produce landslide susceptibility maps using logistic regression (LR), logistic model tree (LMT), and random forest (RF) models. To assess prediction accuracy of the models we employed the following statistical measures: negative predictive value (NPV), sensitivity, positive predictive value (PPV), specificity, root-mean-squared error (RMSE), accuracy, and area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). Our results indicated that the AUC was 92%, 90%, and 88% for the LMT, LR, and RF algorithms, respectively. To assess model performance, we also applied non-parametric statistical tests of Friedman and Wilcoxon, where the results revealed that there were no practical differences among the used models in the study area. While landslide mapping in tropical environment such as Cameron Highlands remains difficult, the remote sensing (RS) along with machine learning techniques, such as the LMT model, show promise for landslide susceptibility mapping in the study area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]