Machine learning for predicting landslide risk of Rohingya refugee camp infrastructure

ABSTRACT Since the dawn of human civilization, forced migration scenarios have been witnessed in different regions and populations, and is still present in the twenty-first century. The current largest population of stateless refugees in the world, the Rohingya people, reside in the southeastern border region of Bangladesh. Due to rapid expansion of refugee camps and lack of suitable locations, a large proportion of the infrastructure are at risk of landslides. This study aims to use machine learning for predicting landslide risk of camp infrastructure using geospatial features. Four supervised classification algorithms have been employed viz., (i) Logistic Regression (LR), (ii) Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), (iii) Gradient Boosted Trees (GBT) and (iv) Random Forest (RF) and applied on preprocessing varied versions of features. Results show that RF achieves accuracy of 76.19% and AUC of 0.76 on un-scaled features which is higher than all other algorithms. The applications of the study reside in refugee management and landslide susceptibility mapping of Rohingya camps, which can both potentially save refugee lives and serve as a case study for global applications.