GIS-Based Soft Computing Models for Landslide Susceptibility Mapping: A Case Study of Pithoragarh District, Uttarakhand State, India

The main objective of the study was to investigate performance of three soft computing models: Naïve Bayes (NB), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network classifier, and Alternating Decision Tree (ADT) in landslide susceptibility mapping of Pithoragarh District of Uttarakhand State, India. For this purpose, data of 91 past landslide locations and ten landslide influencing factors, namely, slope degree, curvature, aspect, land cover, slope forming materials (SFM), elevation, distance to rivers, geomorphology, overburden depth, and distance to roads were considered in the models study. Thematic maps of the Geological Survey of India (GSI), Google Earth images, and Aster Digital Elevation Model (DEM) were used for the development of landslide susceptibility maps in the Geographic Information System (GIS) environment. Landslide locations data was divided into a 70 : 30 ratio for the training (70%) and testing/validation (30%) of the three models. Standard statistical measures, namely, Positive Predicted Values (PPV), Negative Predicted Values (NPV), Sensitivity, Specificity, Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Squire Error (RMSE), and Area under the ROC Curve (AUC) were used for the evaluation of the models. All the three soft computing models used in this study have shown good performance in the accurate development of landslide susceptibility maps, but performance of the ADT and MLP is better than NB. Therefore, these models can be used for the construction of accurate landslide susceptibility maps in other landslide-prone areas also.