Novel evolutionary-optimized neural network for predicting landslide susceptibility

In order to mitigate/prevent the risks of landslides, one of the essential tools that can be used to manage and plan the development of human settlements is landslide susceptibility. The two metaheuristic algorithms explored in this paper are the SCE and VSA algorithms used to optimize the artificial neural network (ANN) model. By integrating the two algorithms with the artificial neural network model, we try to determine its optimum computational parameters in order to generate the landslide susceptibility mapping for the Kurdistan province in Iran. Sixteen causative factors of landslides are included in the spatial database. The landslide susceptibility maps were generated in a GIS medium, and in order to evaluate the employed predictive models, the criterion of the area under the curve (AUC) was employed. This investigation includes 1072 landslide events, which are divided as follows: one-third as testing data and two-thirds as training data (i.e., a 75:25 ratio). The results indicate that after using the abovementioned algorithms, the AUC increased noticeably from 0.708 to 0.788 for SCE-MLP and from 0.744 to 0.818 for VSA-MLP in the training phase. The criterion of the area under the curve was utilized in order to evaluate the accuracy of the employed probabilistic models. Incidentally, the comparable AUCs calculated for the VSA-MLP testing databases and the obtained AUCs were 0.818, 0.801, 0.791, 0.786, 0.784, 0.778, 0.777, 0.776, 0.754 and 0.744, respectively for population size in training databases equal to 50, 350, 500, 150, 450, 200, 400, 300, 100 to and 250. Also, in case of SCE-MLP, the training and testing AUC were found (0.878, 0.865, 0.851, 0.850, 0.819, 0.816, 0.815, 0.781, 0.760, and 0.756) and (0.788, 0.782, 0.759, 0.744, 0.727, 0.720, 0.718, 0.713 and 0.708). The best fit for swarm size conditions of the SCE-MLP and VSA-MLP model showed 150 and 350, respectively. The acquired results indicate that the VSA-ANN model has a better predictive capability in optimization of the structure of the artificial neural network model and computational parameters in comparison with the SCE-ANN.