Hybrid BBO-DE Optimized SPAARCTree Ensemble for Landslide Susceptibility Mapping

This paper presents a new hybrid ensemble modeling method called BBO-DE-STreeEns for land-slide susceptibility mapping in Than Uyen district, Vietnam. The method uses subbagging and random subspacing to generate subdatasets for constituent classifiers of the ensemble model, and a split-point and attribute reduced classifier (SPAARC) decision tree algorithm to build each classifier. To optimize hyperparameters of the ensemble model, a hybridization of biogeography-based optimization (BBO) and differential evolution (DE) algorithms is adopted. The land-slide database for the study area includes 114 landslide locations, 114 non-landslide locations, and ten influencing factors: elevation, slope, curvature, aspect, relief amplitude, soil type, geology, distance to faults, distance to roads, and distance to rivers. The database was used to build and verify the BBO-DE-StreeEns model, and standard statistical metrics, namely, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), sensitivity (Sen), specificity (Spe), accuracy (Acc), Fscore, Cohen’s Kappa, and the area under the ROC curve (AUC), were calculated to evaluate prediction power. Logistic regression, multi-layer perceptron neural network, support vector machine, and SPAARC were used as benchmark models. The results show that the proposed model outperforms the benchmarks with a high prediction power (PPV = 90.3%, NPV = 83.8%, Sen = 82.4%, Spe = 91.2%, Acc = 86.8%, Fscore = 0.862, Kappa = 0.735, and AUC = 0.940). Therefore, the BBO-DE-StreeEns method is a promising tool for landslide susceptibility mapping.