Ensemble stacking: a powerful tool for landslide susceptibility assessment – a case study in Anhua County, Hunan Province, China

Abstract

Traditional landslide susceptibility assessment methods often rely on single models, which can be biased and less accurate. In this article, we introduce a two-tiered strategy to enhance landslide susceptibility predictions. Initially, we employ an ensemble stacking technique that combines the strengths of three machine learning classifiers. This combination leverages the support vector classifier (SVC) as the key meta-classifier to optimize and refine predictions. Subsequently, we integrate the extreme gradient boosting (XGB), random forest (RF) and gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) models with SVC to create hybrid approaches. In this study, we evaluate and compare the effectiveness of six machine learning algorithms for predicting landslide susceptibility in Anhua County, Hunan Province, China. The results demonstrated that the stacking ensemble model outperforms traditional models. The XBG+SVC model achieves the highest AUC value (0.9468), which is followed by the GBDT+SVC (0.9316), RF+SVC (0.9162), XGB (0.9393), GBDT (0.9009), and RF (0.8693). These findings indicate that stacking machine learning approaches hold promise for landslide susceptibility mapping.

Keywords:

• Landslide susceptibility assessment
• stacking ensemble machine learning
• extreme gradient boosting
• support vector classifier
• machine learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work-described in this article was funded by grants from the Research Project of the Geological Bureau of Hunan Province (Project No. HNGSTP202202) and the Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities of the Central South University (Project No. 2023ZZTS0477). The financial support is greatly acknowledged.