Accuracy Improvement of Different Landslide Susceptibility Evaluation Models through K-Means Clustering: A Case Study on China’s Funing County

Landslides occur in most countries. As one of the most serious geological hazards, landslides affect infrastructure construction. Thus, it is vital to prepare reliable landslide susceptibility evaluation maps to avoid landslide-prone areas for various construction projects. In recent years, supervised machine learning algorithms have been widely used in landslide susceptibility evaluation, but many flaws remain in the selection of nonlandslide point samples for comparative analysis. It is significant to improve the authenticity of sample data and reduce the impact of noise. China’s Funing County was used as a case study in this paper, which first identified 122 landslide incidents based on historical data, fieldwork, and remote sensing images to create a landslide inventory in the research area. In addition, 12 causal factors of landslides were determined, including elevation, slope, aspect, plan curvature, profile curvature, distance to roads, distance to rivers, distance to faults, rainfall, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), lithology, and land cover. K-means clustering was used to purify the factor data factors before data-driven certainty factor (CF) and frequency ratio (FR) models, and machine learning models, random forest (RF) and artificial neural network (ANN), were used for a comparative study on landslide susceptibility evaluation in Funing County. The results show that the selection method of nonlandslide sample data will affect the accuracy of different evaluation models. The purified sample data improved the prediction accuracy of the four models, with significant prediction accuracy improvements observed in the ANN model. The purification of nonlandslide sample data by K-means method is of great significance for the drawing of landslide sensitivity map.