Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993

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Science of the Total Environment

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/scitotenv

Comparison of convolutional neural networks for landslide susceptibility

mapping in Yanshan County, China
Yi Wang a,⁎, Zhice Fang a, Haoyuan Hong b,c,d,⁎⁎
a
Institute of Geophysics and Geomatics, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China
b
Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment (Nanjing Normal University), Ministry of Education, Nanjing, 210023, China
c
State Key Laboratory Cultivation Base of Geographical Environment Evolution (Jiangsu Province), Nanjing 210023, China
d
Jiangsu Centre for Collaborative Innovation in Geographic Information Resource Development and Application, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China

H I G H L I G H T S G R A P H I C A L A B S T R A C T

• Convolutional neural networks for land-

slide susceptibility mapping are carried
out for the first time.
• Three novel data representation algo-
rithms are developed to fit the CNN ar-
chitectures.
• A comparative study on the proposed
methods under the CNN framework is
implemented in Yanshan County, China.
• The proposed CNNs are superior to the
state-of-the-art marching learning and
deep learning methods.

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Assessments of landslide disasters are becoming increasingly urgent. The aim of this study is to investigate a
Received 12 November 2018 convolutional neural network (CNN) framework for landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) in Yanshan County,
Received in revised form 17 January 2019 China. The two primary contributions of this study are summarized as follows. First, to the best of our knowledge,
Accepted 16 February 2019
this report describes the first time that the CNN framework is used for LSM. Second, different data representation
Available online 22 February 2019
algorithms are developed to construct three novel CNN architectures. In this work, sixteen influencing factors as-
Editor: Ralf Ludwig sociated with landslide occurrence were considered and historical landslide locations were randomly divided
into training (70% of the total) and validation (30%) sets. Validation of these CNNs was performed using different
Keywords: commonly used measures in comparison to several of the most popular machine learning and deep learning
Landslide susceptibility methods. The experimental results demonstrated that the proportions of highly susceptible zones in all of the
Deep learning CNN landslide susceptibility maps are highly similar and lower than 30%, which indicates that these CNNs are
Convolutional neural network more practical for landslide prevention and management than conventional methods. Furthermore, the pro-
Data presentation algorithm posed CNN framework achieved higher or comparable prediction accuracy. Specifically, the proposed CNNs
Yanshan County
were 3.94%–7.45% and 0.079–0.151 higher than those of the optimized support vector machine (SVM) in
terms of overall accuracy (OA) and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), respectively.
© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

⁎ Corresponding author.
⁎⁎ Correspondence to: H. Hong, Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment (Nanjing Normal University), Ministry of Education, Nanjing 210023, China.
E-mail addresses: cug.yi.wang@gmail.com (Y. Wang), 171301013@stu.njnu.edu.cn, hong_haoyuan@outlook.com (H. Hong).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.02.263
0048-9697/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
976 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993
1. Introduction
Landslides are among the most common and catastrophic natural
hazards, causing numerous casualties and fatalities every year
(Kavzoglu et al., 2014). Many influencing factors contribute to landslide
occurrences (Bui et al., 2016a). Therefore, landslide spatial prediction
using these influencing factors is essential in preventing and decreasing
landslide damages.
Recently, various machine learning (ML) methods have been
employed in regional landslide spatial prediction, including naïve
Bayes (Pham et al., 2016a; Shirzadi et al., 2017; Tsangaratos and Ilia,
2016), decision trees (Chen et al., 2017b; Wang et al., 2016), support
vector machines (SVMs) (Bui et al., 2016b; Hong et al., 2016b; Hong
et al., 2017a; Pham et al., 2016a), random forests (Chen et al., 2018b;
Hong et al., 2016a; Hong et al., 2017b) and artificial neural networks
(ANNs) (Bui et al., 2016b; Chen et al., 2017a; Yingying Tian et al.,
2019). Therefore, advanced ML approaches are considerably promising
for landslide spatial prediction. For example, with the rapid develop-
ment of neural network (NN) techniques, the classification capability
of an NN to fit a decision boundary plane has become significantly
more reliable (LeCun et al., 2015). However, the previously mentioned
ML approaches directly classify the input data and cannot uncover
more representative features from these data to further improve classi-
fication accuracies (Andrieu et al., 2003).
To address this problem, the deep learning (DL) framework has re-
cently received more attention. DL is one of the most popular branches
in the ML field based on learning (in a supervised, semi-supervised or
unsupervised way) data representations, which is different from task-
specific approaches (Bengio et al., 2013; LeCun et al., 2015;
Schmidhuber, 2015). This framework has been applied in various fields
and can achieve results comparable or superior to human experts
(Cireşan et al., 2012b; Krizhevsky et al., 2012). Among the different DL
techniques, convolutional neural network (CNN) plays a significant
role in addressing pattern recognition problems (Ren et al., 2015). Spe-
cifically, it is capable of recognizing patterns with extreme variability
(such as handwritten characters) using convolutional and pooling
layers, which reflect the translation-invariant nature of most images
(Simard et al., 2003). More recently, the CNN technique has been used
to detect and recognize landslides using remote sensing images (Ding
et al., 2016; Yu et al., 2017). However, none of these studies assessed
the effectiveness of CNN to map landslide susceptible zones.
The objective of this study is to present a CNN framework for re-
gional landslide susceptibility analysis in Yanshan County, China. The
two primary contributions of this work can be summarized as follows.
First, to the best of our knowledge, this report describes the first time
that the CNN framework is used for landslide susceptibility mapping
(LSM). We attempt to explore the powerful prediction capability of
CNNs and provide meaningful information for further research. Second,
different data representation algorithms are developed to construct
three novel CNN architectures to fit the landslide prediction process.
To assess the effectiveness of CNNs, several commonly used measures
of overall accuracy (OA), Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), re-
ceiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and area under curve
(AUC) were used for comparison with conventional methods.
2. Study area
Yanshan County is located in the municipality of Shangrao, in north-
eastern Jiangxi Province, China, covering an area of approximately
2180km2 and extending between 117°25′E and 118°0′E longitude and
27°48′Ν and 28°25′Ν latitude. The population of the study area is
477,715 people, of whom 202,263 live in towns. Approximately 60.0%
of the study area has a slope gradient that is b20°, whereas areas with
a slope gradient N40° account for only 5% of the total area, with altitudes
ranging from −27 m to 2144 m above sea level, as shown in Fig. 1.
Yanshan County has a subtropical climate. According to the Jiangxi
Province Meteorological Bureau (http://www.weather.gov.cn), the av-
erage annual rainfall during 1959–2016 ranged between 1700 and
2100 mm, based on the historical records of 27 rain gauge stations. Av-
erage annual temperature and annual sunshine were between 17.2 and
19.6 °C and 1792 h, respectively.
3. Material and methodology
The methodological hierarchy in this work is based on the CNN
framework and four CNN architectures are considered for LSM. Specifi-
cally, the gain ratio (GR) method is first used to select the most signifi-
cant influencing factors. Then, three data representation forms are
performed to convert the input data to a series of subimages (with dif-
ferent dimensions) to fit the CNN architecture. Next, these subimages
are placed into the CNN architectures for landslide susceptibility model-
ling using the training set. Finally, the final prediction results obtained
from the CNNs are evaluated using the validation set based on qualita-
tive and quantitative analysis. The flowchart of the proposed CNN
framework is illustrated in Fig. 2. Some related techniques are intro-
duced in the following subsections.
3.1. Landslide inventory mapping
Landslide inventory mapping can be interpreted from visual inspec-
tion using high-resolution remote sensing images (Pham et al., 2017b;
Pham et al., 2017c; Pham et al., 2017d; Tsangaratos et al., 2017). Google
Earth™ has been widely used for landslide detection and LSM by using
remote sensing images with different resolutions, including Worldview,
IKONOS, QuickBird, SPOT, Pléiades, Gaofen and Landsat images
(Broeckx et al., 2018; Chigira et al., 2010; Pulighe et al., 2016). Therefore,
the landslide inventory map for Yanshan County with 380 historical
landslide locations provided by the Jiangxi Department of Land and Re-
sources (http://www.jxgtt.gov.cn) and Jiangxi Meteorological Bureau
(http://www.weather.gov.cn), and field surveys and image interpreta-
tion were sourced from Google Earth™. These landslide locations in-
clude both rotational slides and translational slides. The smallest and
largest landslides are approximately 172 m2 and 15,722 m2, respec-
tively, and the average area of all landslides is 2531 m2. In this study,
all of the landslide locations previously mentioned were used to con-
struct a landslide dataset that more accurately represents the geo-
environmental settings of the landslide areas, of which 266 locations
(70%) were randomly selected for training and the remaining 114 loca-
tions (30%) for validation. The landslide inventory map of the study area
is shown in Fig. 1.
3.2. Landslide influencing factors
The environmental conditions of landslide occurrences are crucial to
landslide susceptibility prediction. Therefore, historical landslide events
were used to construct relevant LSM methods based on the assumption
that landslides that occur in the future are subjected to the same envi-
ronments as the previous landslides.
The selection of influencing factors for evaluating landslide hazards
is a key step of LSM. There are hundreds of influencing factors that affect
landslides (Reichenbach et al., 2018). It is necessary to select appropri-
ate factors to produce a reliable landslide susceptibility map. For exam-
ple, slope can reflect the steepness of the study area and steep slopes are
highly prone to landslides (Varnes, 1984). Generally, gentle slopes ap-
pear to have lower landslide susceptibility than steep slopes (Dai
et al., 2001). Aspect is related to landslide occurrences because slopes
with different orientations experience different effects of precipitation
and solar radiation (Pourghasemi et al., 2012; Varnes, 1984). Plan curva-
ture and profile curvature can effectively reflect terrain complexity and
topography (Oh and Pradhan, 2011). Different soil types have different
 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993
Fig. 1. Location of the study area.
surface characteristics that may cause landslides (Bui et al., 2017;
Varnes, 1984). Land use is a key factor that contributes to landslide oc-
currences and has an important impact on the stability of slopes in
terms of vegetative coverage (Pham et al., 2016c). Lithology is one of
the most commonly used factors in LSM and some geological formations
are more favourable to landslides. Rainfall is a key landslide-induced
factor because it can influence the shear strength of slopes (Pham
et al., 2016b; Varnes, 1984). The factors of distance to faults, roads and
rivers have an important impact on the spread and size of landslides
in the study area (Pham et al., 2016a; Pham et al., 2015). According to
previous works, environmental conditions and the available data of
the study area, sixteen influencing factors were considered in this
work for landslide analysis, including the morphological factors of alti-
tude, aspect, slope, plan curvature, profile curvature, STI, SPI and TWI,
the geological factors of lithology and distance to faults, the land cover
factors of land use, NDVI, soil and distance to roads, the hydrological fac-
tor of distance to river and rainfall. In addition, selection of a suitable
terrain mapping unit is significant for LSM. Among all terrain mapping
units, grid cells are the most popular for raster-based GIS users in
modelling landslide susceptibility. Using ArcGIS 10.2 software, each fac-
tor was converted in the form of spatially defined layers of maps with a
grid size of 25 × 25 m, which is in accord with the digital elevation
model (DEM) data generated from 1:50,000 scale topographic maps.
3.3. Influencing factor evaluators
Feature selection is very important in the field of data mining, espe-
cially in landslide spatial prediction. High dimensionality of the training
977
and validation sets may make the prediction process very complex.
Meanwhile, the curse of dimensionality always results in poor predic-
tion accuracies. The feature selection is beneficial for using attribution
selection methods and obtaining high-quality data. Furthermore, this
step can remove extraneous and redundant features from all the avail-
able attributes. In this work, two influencing factor evaluators of
multicollinearity analysis and GR are considered and introduced in the
following subsections.
3.3.1. Multicollinearity analysis
To estimate the correlation between the landslides' influencing
factors, multicollinearity analysis was applied in this study.
Multicollinearity is a statistical phenomenon in which there exists a
high relationship between two or more predictor variables in a multiple
regression model (O'brien, 2007). In this study, tolerance (TOL) and var-
iance inflation factor (VIF) were used to detect multicollinearity among
influencing factors. Let X = {X1, X2, … , XN} define a given independent
variable set and R2j denote the coefficient of determination when the
jth independent variable Xj is regressed on all other predictor variables
in the model. The VIF value is computed as follows:


VIF ¼ 1= 1−R2j ð1Þ
The TOL value is the reciprocal of the VIF value and represents the
degree of linear correlation between independent variables. If the VIF
value is above 10 or the TOL value is b0.1, the corresponding factors
978 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993

Fig. 2. Flowchart of the proposed CNN framework.

are multicollinearity and should be removed from the landslide predic- Finally, the GR is defined as follows:
tion models.
GainðAÞ
GainRatioðAÞ ¼ ð6Þ
3.3.2. Gain ratio method SplitInfoA ðSÞ
In this study, the feature selection method of gain ratio (GR) was
used to select an optimal subset to improve the prediction perfor- The average merit (AM) deprived from this method uncovers the
mance in LSM (Dash and Liu, 1997). The information gain measure importance between conditioning factors and landslide occurrence. If
is used to select an attribute at each node of the decision tree. this value is equal to or b0, the corresponding factor is considered to
Then, the GR that is an extension of information gain is proposed to be an irrelevant attribute and should be excluded for prediction,
overcome the bias. For clarification, the GR method is introduced as whereas the remaining factors are used in the following prediction
follows. process.
Let S be a training set and n be the total of samples, with the expected
information given by 3.4. CNN

X
n
A CNN model, exhibiting robust performance in visual image analy-
HðSÞ ¼ − pi log2 ðpi Þ ð2Þ
i¼1
sis, is a class of feed-forward NN whose artificial neurons respond to a
portion of the surrounding elements (Girshick, 2015). This implies
that a CNN is a variation of a multilayer perceptron consisting of one
where pi is the probability that a sample belongs to class Ci. The attribute
or more convolution, max pooling and fully connected layers (Hoo-
A has m values and its average entropy is given by
Chang et al., 2016). The structure of a typical CNN is shown in Fig. 3. A
X
n basic CNN always has input, convolutional, max pooling, fully connected
EðAÞ ¼ − pi HðSÞ ð3Þ and output layers. The input layer is a m × n matrix in which every ele-
i¼1 ment has a feature value; thus, the input data can be represented as a
two-dimensional feature map. Each convolutional layer consists of sev-
and the information gain on attribute A is eral convolutional units, and parameters of every unit are optimized by
a back-propagation algorithm. The purpose of a convolutional manipu-
GainðAÞ ¼ HðSÞ−EðAÞ ð4Þ lation is to extract different features of the input layer (Sharif Razavian
et al., 2014). The first convolutional layer may only extract some low-
The split information value represents the potential information ob- level features such as lines, edges and corners. More convolutional
tained by splitting S into m parts corresponding to m outcomes on attri- layers can iteratively learn more intricate representations from low-
bute A and can be computed as follows: level features. Pooling is a critical manipulation in the CNN technique
(Szegedy et al., 2015). In fact, it is a form of down-sampling to reduce
the dimensionality of feature maps, without altering the depth of
X
m
SplitInfoA ðSÞ ¼ − X i ðSi =SÞ log2 ðSi =SÞ ð5Þ these maps. Max pooling is the most common manipulation in different
i¼1 pooling approaches. The aim of this manipulation is to divide the feature
 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993
Fig. 3. Generalized CNN architecture.
maps into a number of rectangular areas and produce the maximum
value for each area. Furthermore, this manipulation can continuously
reduce the dimensionality of data, hence the number of parameters
and amount of computational cost decrease. Consequently, the over-
fitting problem can be avoided. The fully connected layer reorganizes
extracted representations to reduce the loss of feature information,
and the output layer produces classification results. It should be noted
that the relative position of discovered features to other features is
more important than the precise location, which is very distinctive to
CNN.
CNNs are skilled in visual recognition, having different
convolutional, max pooling and fully connected layers. For example,
LeNet-5 is a CNN structure used in handwritten digit recognition and
it can effectively solve some visually related problems (LeCun et al.,
1995). However, LeNet-5 cannot be directly employed in landslide sus-
ceptibility analysis. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed new CNN ar-
chitectures that are suitable to landslide susceptibility analysis and
compared them with the traditional CNN structure of LeNet-5.
Generally, a commonly used LeNet-5 is comprised of eight layers
(LeCun et al., 1998). Given n × n input data, C1 is a convolutional layer
with six (n – 4) × (n – 4) feature maps and each unit in the feature
Fig. 4. LeNet-5 architecture.
979
maps is connected to a 5 × 5 neighbourhood in the input map. S2 is a
max pooling layer for subsampling with six ðn−4Þ2
feature maps. The
22
max pooling kernel size is 2 × 2 and each unit in the feature maps is
connected to the previous layer. C3 is another convolutional layer
2
with sixteen ðn−12Þ
22
feature maps that each unit is connected to a 5 × 5
neighbourhood in the previous layer. The layer S4 performs the max
pooling process and has sixteen ðn−12Þ2
feature maps. F5 and F6 are
42
fully connected layers with 120 and 84 neural units, respectively. Fi-
nally, the output layer produces two neural units to indicate the binary
classification results of “landslide” and “non-landslide”. Fig. 4 shows the
architecture of LeNet-5 when n = 24.
3.5. The proposed CNN architectures
The aim of this work is to develop a novel CNN framework for
regional landslide susceptibility analysis. However, landslide data have
different expressions to fit the CNN architectures, which may influence
landslide susceptibility results. In this section, three different data rep-
resentation forms were used to construct the novel CNN architectures,
980 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993
including one-dimensional, two-dimensional and three-dimensional
forms of data representation. Therefore, we construct different CNN
structures to fit different data representations. In the following, we
term the CNN coupling with the one-dimensional, two-dimensional
and three-dimensional data representation algorithms as CNN-1D,
CNN-2D and CNN-3D, respectively.
3.5.1. CNN-1D
For LSM, the input data can be regarded as a picture in which each
pixel has several landslide influencing attributes. Therefore, each grid
cell of the input data is represented by a column vector with a length de-
fined by the number of landslide influencing factors. Moreover, each el-
ement in this vector corresponds to a landslide influencing attribute. In
this work, we develop a 1D CNN structure to directly extract the infor-
mation from landslide influencing factors and landslide susceptibility
analysis. The 1D CNN architecture consists of one convolutional layer,
one max pooling layer and one fully connected layer. Assuming that
there are n landslide influencing factors in the input data, the
convolutional layer filters the input data with N kernels with a size of
m × 1, and thus this layer has N feature vectors with lengths of (n – m
+ 1). Each element in the feature vector is connected to a m × 1
neighbourhood in the input vector. The max pooling layer has a size of
a × 1 and its result is composed of N vectors with a length of n−mþ1 a
The fully connected layer with k neural units follows the previous
layer to represent the extracted features. Finally, we produce two neural
units in the output layer to resolve a binary classification problem. Fig. 5
illustrates the architecture of CNN-1D when n = 15, N = 20, m = 3, a =
2 and k = 50.
3.5.2. CNN-2D
The probability of landslide occurrence of each grid cell is related to
all the influencing factors. This implies that each grid cell has a set of
unique attribute values that can reflect the potential of a landslide oc-
curring. As mentioned in Section 3.3, the CNN technique has been suc-
cessfully applied in image processing. To apply this technique for LSM,
Fig. 5. CNN-1D architecture.
initialization must be performed by converting a one-dimensional
input grid cell (vector) comprised of different attribute features into a
two-dimensional matrix. In this work, we compare the number of
landslide influencing factors with that of attribute values of each factor,
and choose the maximum of these two numbers to be the size of the
corresponding two-dimensional matrix. For example, there are 24
lithological categories in the study area, a number that is larger than
that of the landslide influencing factors (15). Therefore, we constructed
a 24 × 24 matrix for each grid cell. Fig. 6 illustrates the conversion
manipulation from a one-dimensional input grid cell (vector) to a
two-dimensional matrix. Specifically, for each column vector in this
matrix, the element value at the position that corresponds to the
corresponding attribute value is assigned to be 1, and other element
values in this vector are assigned to be 0.
There is one convolutional layer and one max pooling layer in the
proposed 2D CNN structure. Each convolution layer is followed by a
dropout layer. It is assumed that each landslide grid cell unit is trans-
formed into a n × n matrix. The first convolutional layer filters the
input data with N kernels with a size of m × m, and thus this layer
has twenty (n–m + 1) × (n–m + 1) feature maps. Each grid cell in
the feature maps is connected to a m × m neighbourhood in the
input map. The dropout manipulation temporarily discards the NN
units according to a certain probability during the training process
.
of the CNN network. This solves for the over-fitting problem and im-
proves classification accuracies. Following the convolutional step, a
drop manipulation is used. The max pooling layer has a size of a ×
a. Therefore, the results of this layer consist of N matrices with a
size of ½ðn−mþ1Þ
a   ½ðn−mþ1Þ
a , which are then transferred to the second
convolutional layer with M kernels whose size is m × m, followed
by a dropout manipulation. The results of this convolutional layer
consist of M matrices with a size of ½n−ðaþ1Þðm−1Þ
a   ½n−ðaþ1Þðm−1Þ
a ,
which are then continuously transferred to the second max pooling
layer with M whose size is a × a. The resultant M feature maps with
a size of ½n−ðaþ1Þðm−1Þ
a2
  ½n−ðaþ1Þðm−1Þ
a2
 are produced by this max
pooling layer. A fully connected layer with k neural units follows
 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993 981

Fig. 6. Two-dimensional data form. (a) Input data and (b) the conversion of a 1D grid cell to a 2D matrix.

the previous layer to reorganize the extracted features. Finally, the
output layer produces two neural units to indicate binary classifica-
tion results of “landslide” and “non-landslide”. Fig. 6 illustrates the
two-dimensional data form and Fig. 7 shows the architecture of
CNN-2D when n = 24, m = 3, N = 20, M = 15, a = 2 and k = 78.
3.5.3. CNN-3D
Regarding the three-dimensional data representation, the input data
of the study area can be represented as a three dimensional matrix of
size c × n × n, where n denotes the row and column of each data layer
and c represents the number of the landslide influencing factors. For
example, given a neighbourhood of each grid cell with a size of 7 × 7,
the three-dimensional data representation is illustrated in Fig. 8.
Under these circumstances, we proposed a 3D CNN architecture to
extract the influencing factors information and spatial relation to pre-
dict the probability of landslide occurrence. Specifically, the three-
dimensional CNN network was composed of one convolutional layer
of N kernels with a size of m × m × m, one max pooling layer and one
fully connected layer. Provided the c × n × n input data, the
convolutional layer has N feature maps with a size of (c–m + 1) × (n–
m + 1) × (n–m + 1). Each grid cell is connected to a m × m × m
neighbourhood in the input data. The next hidden layer is a max pooling
982 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993

Fig. 7. 2D CNN architecture.

layer with a size of a × a. Thus, the output results from the max pooling
layer have N feature maps with a size of ½c−mþ1 a   ½n−mþ1
a   ½n−mþ1
a . A
fully connected layer with k neural units follows the max pooling
layer to learn the extracted features. Finally, we position two neural
units in the output layer to represent a “landslide” and “non-landslide”.
Fig. 9 illustrates the architecture of CNN-3D when c = 15, n = 7, N = 20,
m = 3, a = 2 and k = 78.
3.5.4. The related parameters
Parameter settings have a significant impact on the performance of
classification/prediction methods. In this subsection, some related pa-
rameters used in the proposed CNNs are briefly introduced. On the
one hand, the influence of activation functions and loss functions in
the CNN architecture is very important. In the ANN techniques, the out-
put of each layer is always a linear function of its previous layer. How-
ever, it is very difficult to represent the actual situation using this
linear relationship (Huang and Babri, 1998). To solve for this problem,
the activation function technique was used to fit the output data be-
cause it can effectively convert linear relationships to nonlinear rela-
tionships through predefined activation (nonlinear) functions (Dahl
et al., 2012). A rectified linear unit (ReLU) function was used in CNN net-
works (Dahl et al., 2013). The ReLU function is one of the most common
and efficient activation functions in CNN, and it has two main advan-
tages: First, this function can overcome the problem of gradient disap-
pearance. Second, it is more efficient and effective for training
prediction methods than other activation functions (Maas et al.,
2013). The categorical cross-entropy function and advanced adaptive
gradient (AdaGrad) algorithm were employed as a loss function and
its optimizer, respectively (Anthimopoulos et al., 2016). The AdaGrad
method can provide a constraint on the learning rate and use different
learning rates for each learning parameter per iteration (Duchi et al.,
2011). The softmax function was used to produce a posteriori probabil-
ity for each grid cell (Lawrence et al., 1997). On the other hand, dropout
manipulation plays an important role for improving prediction perfor-
mance because it can temporarily discard the neural network units ac-
cording to a particular probability during the training process (Hinton
et al., 2012). Specifically, dropout manipulation forces a neural unit to
work with other randomly selected neural units to reducing over-
fitting and the coadaptation between hidden units (Srivastava et al.,
2014). Furthermore, this manipulation can enhance the generalization
of prediction methods (Dahl et al., 2013).

Fig. 8. Three-dimensional data form.

 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993 983

Fig. 9. 3D CNN architecture.

3.6. Model evaluation methods
To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, measure-
ments of the OA and ROC curve were used (Chen et al., 2017c; Pham
et al., 2017b; Tsangaratos and Ilia, 2016). The OA value is the ratio of
the number of correctly classified grid cells to the total number of grid
cells, calculated as follows:
In ML, the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) has been used as
a measure of binary classifications, even if the two classes are of very dif-
ferent sizes (Matthews, 1975). The MCC is defined as follows:
TP  TN−FP  FN
MCC ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ð8Þ
ðTP þ FPÞðTP þ FNÞðTN þ FP ÞðTN þ FNÞ

a
OA ¼  100%
b
where a and b denote the numbers of correctly classified landslide or
non-landslide grid cells and the total number of grid cells in the valida-
tion set. A higher OA value implies better classification precision. The
ROC curve is a standard technique for the performance evaluation of
landslide prediction methods (Bradley, 1997). It is produced by plotting
the true positive (TP) rate against the false positive (FP) rate at various
threshold values. The TP rate and the FP rate are also referred to “sensi-
tivity” and “100-specificity” in statistics, respectively. Moreover, the
AUC measure has been widely used to quantitatively evaluate the per-
formance of LSM approaches (Mandal and Mandal, 2018; Pham et al.,
2017a; Wang et al., 2017). Specifically, a prediction approach is consid-
ered good if the AUC value is close to 1 (Tsangaratos et al., 2017; Zhu
et al., 2018).
ð7Þ where TP and TN (true negative) represent the number of landslide and
non-landslide samples that are correctly classified, whereas FP and FN
(false negative) denote the number of non-landslide and landslide sam-
ples that are misclassified. Moreover, this measure is actually a correla-
tion coefficient between the observed and predicted classes. Generally,
a final result is regarded as a prefect prediction if the MCC value equals
to 1, whereas MCC values of 0 and −1 represent a random prediction
and a total disagreement between prediction and observation,
respectively.
Moreover, a chi-square test was used to evaluate the significant dif-
ference between expected methods (Kuncheva, 2004). It is based on a
prior hypothesis that LSM methods have no significant difference
(Tallarida and Murray, 1987). Chi-square and p values were selected
and calculated for validation. In general, if the p value is smaller than
0.05 and the chi-square value is higher than 3.841, there is a significant
difference between the two LSM methods (Pham et al., 2017a).

Table 1
Multicollinearity analysis of landslide influencing factors.

Landslide influencing factors Statistics

TOL VIF

Altitude 0.249 4.020

Aspect 0.935 1.069
Distance to faults 0.865 1.156
Land use 0.695 1.438
Lithology 0.776 1.289
NDVI 0.700 1.428
Plan curvature 0.569 1.756
Profile curvature 0.726 1.378
Rainfall 0.590 1.695
Distance to rivers 0.828 1.207
Distance to roads 0.852 1.174
Slope 0.310 3.221
Soil 0.351 2.846
SPI 0.102 9.802
STI 0.096 10.466
TWI 0.443 2.258
Fig. 10. AM of each landslide influencing factor using the GR method.
984 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993

Table 2
Spatial relationship between each landslide conditioning factor and landslide using the FR model.

Factor Class No. of landslides Percentage of landslides No. of pixels in domain Percentage of domain FR

200–400 108 28.42 736,559 21.27 1.34

400–600 79 20.79 497,448 14.36 1.45
600–1000 108 28.42 593,363 17.13 1.66
1000–1400 36 9.47 232,973 6.73 1.41
N 1400 22 5.79 125,653 3.63 1.60
Aspect Flat 0 0.00 21,778 0.63 0.00
North 9 2.37 435,037 12.56 0.19
Northeast 14 3.68 438,426 12.66 0.29
East 68 17.89 459,958 13.28 1.35
Southeast 102 26.84 392,302 11.33 2.37
South 75 19.74 375,231 10.83 1.82
Southwest 62 16.32 389,014 11.23 1.45
West 34 8.95 489,863 14.14 0.63
Northwest 16 4.21 461,844 13.33 0.32
Distance to faults (m) 0–2000 138 36.32 1,107,234 31.97 1.14
2000–5000 128 33.68 1,123,993 32.45 1.04
5000–8000 79 20.79 630,206 18.20 1.14
8000–11,000 26 6.84 323,193 9.33 0.73
N 11,000 9 2.37 278,827 8.05 0.29
Landuse Grass 65 17.11 974,430 28.13 0.61
Water 0 0.00 14,468 0.42 0.00
Forest 304 80.00 1,819,269 52.53 1.52
Farmland 3 0.79 261,041 7.54 0.10
Residential 5 1.32 362,690 10.47 0.13
Bare 3 0.79 31,555 0.91 0.87
Lithology A 0 0.00 20,399 0.59 0.00
B 0 0.00 428,033 12.36 0.00
C 0 0.00 10,201 0.29 0.00
D 59 15.53 435,322 12.57 1.24
E 57 15.00 277,368 8.01 1.87
F 0 0.00 23,628 0.68 0.00
G 4 1.05 138,451 4.00 0.26
H 0 0.00 76,832 2.22 0.00
I 30 7.89 165,735 4.79 1.65
J 3 0.79 122,923 3.55 0.22
K 7 1.84 155,381 4.49 0.41
L 11 2.89 83,728 2.42 1.20
M 110 28.95 841,897 24.31 1.19
N 1 0.26 11,530 0.33 0.79
O 40 10.53 263,127 7.60 1.39
P 2 0.53 24,377 0.70 0.75
Q 0 0.00 5872 0.17 0.00
R 1 0.26 57,458 1.66 0.16
S 15 3.95 176,934 5.11 0.77
T 0 0.00 29,718 0.86 0.00
U 5 1.32 37,506 1.08 1.22
V 7 1.84 21,033 0.61 3.03
W 28 7.37 55,893 1.61 4.57
X 0 0.00 107 0.00 0.00
NDVI b 0.1 27 7.11 982,767 28.38 0.25
0.1–0.2 50 13.16 895,248 25.85 0.51
0.2–0.3 174 45.79 1,119,767 32.33 1.42
0.3–0.4 116 30.53 425,473 12.28 2.48
N 0.4 13 3.42 40,198 1.16 2.95
Plan curvature b −0.4 143 37.63 1,081,806 31.23 1.20
−0.4–0.5 133 35.00 1,399,644 40.41 0.87
N 0.5 104 27.37 982,003 28.35 0.97
Profile curvature b −1 67 17.63 667,079 19.26 0.92
(−1) - 0.2 133 35.00 1,346,078 38.87 0.90
N 0.2 180 47.37 1,450,296 41.87 1.13
Rainfall b 1000 0 0.00 62,560 1.81 0.00
1000–1200 88 23.16 828,235 23.91 0.97
1200–1300 91 23.95 1,251,534 36.14 0.66
1300–1400 143 37.63 955,719 27.59 1.36
N 1400 58 15.26 365,405 10.55 1.45
Distance to rivers (m) b 200 58 15.26 1,064,718 30.74 0.50
200–400 85 22.37 903,585 26.09 0.86
400–700 152 40.00 997,555 28.80 1.39
N 700 85 22.37 497,595 14.37 1.56
Distance to roads (m) b 600 127 33.42 1,274,023 36.78 0.91
600–1300 125 32.89 1,108,941 32.02 1.03
1300–2300 92 24.21 808,140 23.33 1.04
N 2300 36 9.47 272,349 7.86 1.20
Slope (°) 0–10 44 11.58 1,041,810 30.08 0.38
 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993 985

Table 2 (continued)

Factor Class No. of landslides Percentage of landslides No. of pixels in domain Percentage of domain FR

10–20 129 33.95 1,056,375 30.50 1.11

20–30 109 28.68 754,343 21.78 1.32
30–40 62 16.32 434,489 12.54 1.30
40–50 30 7.89 151,131 4.36 1.81
50–60 4 1.05 23,871 0.69 1.53
N 60 2 0.53 1434 0.04 12.71
Soil ATc 15 3.95 522,583 15.09 0.26
ACh 147 38.68 1,680,645 48.53 0.80
ACu 84 22.11 646,566 18.67 1.18
LVh 51 13.42 216,258 6.24 2.15
ALh 82 21.58 378,741 10.94 1.97
CMu 1 0.26 18,660 0.54 0.49
SPI b 10 33 8.68 708,150 20.45 0.42
10–20 58 15.26 567,134 16.37 0.93
20–35 52 13.68 484,677 13.99 0.98
35–50 25 6.58 274,544 7.93 0.83
N 50 212 55.79 1,428,948 41.26 1.35
TWI b5 82 21.58 562,670 16.25 1.33
5–7 200 52.63 1,927,531 55.65 0.95
7–9 56 14.74 705,905 20.38 0.72
9–11 31 8.16 220,069 6.35 1.28
N 11 11 2.89 47,278 1.37 2.12

4. Results
4.1. Relative importance analysis of influencing factors
The predictive capability of all the landslide influencing factors was
evaluated using the training set based on multicollinearity analysis
and the GR method. Table 1 lists the results of the multicollinearity anal-
ysis of landslide influencing factors. The factor of STI is shown to have a
VIF value that is 10.466 larger than the threshold value (10). Therefore,
it should be removed from the prediction processes.
For the GR method, factors with higher weights are more significant
to the prediction methods, whereas factors with weights of zero cannot
contribute to landslide susceptibility modelling and should be excluded
from further analysis. Fig. 10 shows the AM of each influencing factors.
Among these factors, the landuse factor has the highest AM value of
0.0617, which indicates that it is more important than the other factors.
The AM values of NDVI, altitude, lithology, slope, soil, distance to rivers,
aspect, SPI and rainfall are between 0.0474 and 0.0151. Furthermore,
the AM values of distance to faults, distance to roads, plan curvature,
TWI and profile curvature are positive but b0.01, which indicates little
contribution is provided to the models. According to previous analysis,
all the remaining landslide influencing factors with AM values greater
than zero contribute to the LSM.
4.2. Influencing factors analyses using FR model
The relationship between landslide occurrence and related influenc-
ing factors using an FR model is summarized in Table 2. If the FR value
N1, the corresponding area is more prone to landslide occurrence (Oh
et al., 2011). In Table 2, for altitude, the b200 m class has the lowest
FR value of 0.19 and the FR values of other classes are all above 1. Results
regarding aspect demonstrated that the highest FR value of 2.37 belongs
to the southeast class in which N26% of the landslides occurred. In the
case of distance to faults, the highest FR value of 1.14 belongs to the
0–2000 m and 5000–8000 m classes. However, for the factors of dis-
tance to rivers and distance to roads, the FR value increases as the dis-
tance increases. Regarding the results of land-use factor, the forest
class has the highest FR value of 1.52, accounting for 80% of the landslide
occurrences, which indicates that this class has significant importance
to landslide occurrence. Lithology results revealed that the W class has
the highest FR value of 4.57, indicating highest probability of landslide
occurrence. For the NDVI factor, the FR value increases as the factor
class value increases. Rainfall is a critical factor on landslide incidence
that influences soil structure; thus, the highest rainfall of N1400 mm
has the highest FR value of 1.45. With respect to plan curvature and pro-
file curvature factors, the b−0.4 and N0.2 classes have the highest FR
values of 1.2 and 1.13, accounting for over 37% and 47% of landslide oc-
currences in the study area, respectively. The N60° class of slope factor
with the highest FR value of 12.71 has much greater probability of land-
slide occurrence than the other classes. The highest FR value of 2.15 cor-
responds to the LVh soil type. For SPI factor, N50% of landslides occurred
in the N50 class, which had the highest FR value of 1.35. The relationship
between landslide occurrence and TWI showed that the N11 and 7–9
classes have the highest and lowest FR values of 2.12 and 0.72, respec-
tively. Fig. 11 presents reclassification maps of all the landslide influenc-
ing factors for better visual inspection.
4.3. Model validation and comparison
In this subsection, we used the three proposed CNN and LeNet-5
methods introduced in Section 3 for experiments in landslide suscepti-
bility analysis. All source codes of the methods previously mentioned
were implemented in Python under the well-known TensorFlow frame-
work (http://www.tensorflow.org). TensorFlow is an open source soft-
ware library using data flow graphs and has been widely used in ML and
DL. The experimental results were produced using a PC equipped with
an Intel Core i5-8400 processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 graphics
card. To construct the CNNs, all the parameter settings were optimized
through a training process using the trial-and-error method, as shown
in Table 3.
As the landslide prediction methods were constructed using the
training set, each grid cell in the study area was assigned a susceptibility
index. After assigning weights to the factor classes, the landslide suscep-
tibility map was prepared in an ArcGIS environment. For better visuali-
zation, the indices were reclassified using the natural breaks method
into five levels of very low, low, moderate, high and very high. Fig. 12 il-
lustrates landslide susceptibility maps obtained by different CNNs and
Fig. 13 shows the distribution of each class per landslide susceptibility
map. It can be observed that the northernmost part of all susceptibility
maps are categorized as very low and low susceptible zones. The results
of CNN-1D and CNN-2D were very similar. However, the very high class
in Fig. 12 (a) was evenly distributed in the study area, whereas this class
in Fig. 12 (b) was mainly concentrated in the northwest and southern-
most parts of the study area. For the result of CNN-3D in Fig. 12 (c),
more than half of the study area were marked as very low, whereas
the percentage was b10% for the low, moderate and high classes. The
986 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993
Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993 987
988 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993
Fig. 11. Thematic maps of the study area. (a) Altitude, (b) aspect, (c) distance to faults, (d) land use, (e) lithology, (f) NDVI, (g) plan curvature, (h) profile curvature, (i) rainfall, (j) distance
to rivers, (k) distance to roads, (l) slope, (m) soil, (n) SPI and (o) TWI.
result of LeNet-5 in Fig. 12 (d) demonstrated the largest very high sus-
ceptible zones, approximately 30% of the study area. It should be
noted that the sum of the proportions of the very high and high classes
is similar for all the proposed CNNs. Specifically, the very high and high
classes of the CNN-1D, CNN-2D and CNN-3D are 25.42%, 29.52% and
Table 3
Parameter settings of the CNNs.
Method Parameter settings
CNN-1D Convolutional kernel size: 3 × 1; max pooling kernel size: 2 × 1; number
of iterations: 300; activation function: ReLU; optimizer: AdaGrad
CNN-2D Convolutional kernel size: 3 × 3; max pooling kernel size: 2 × 2; number
of iterations: 100; activation function: ReLU; optimizer: AdaGrad;
dropout rate: 0.4 and 0.3
CNN-3D Convolutional kernel size: 3 × 3 × 3; max pooling kernel size: 2 × 2 × 2;
number of iterations: 300; activation function: ReLU; optimizer:
AdaGrad
LeNet-5 Convolutional kernel size: 5 × 5; max pooling kernel size: 2 × 2; number
of iterations: 15; activation function: ReLU; optimizer: AdaGrad
25.36%, respectively, which demonstrates that the proposed methods
are more practical for landslide prevention and management than the
LeNet-5 method with a proportion of 44.76%.
Table 4 lists the OA and MCC values of the three proposed CNNs and
the LeNet-5 method. The proposed CNNs achieve higher OA values than
that of LeNet-5. Specifically, the CNN-2D method achieved the highest
OA value of 77.63%, which is approximately 3% higher than that of
LeNet-5, followed by CNN-3D and CNN-1D with OA values of 75.88%
and 74.12%, respectively. In addition, CNN-2D obtained the highest
MCC value of 0.555, followed by CNN-3D, LeNet-5 and CNN-1D with
MCC values of 0.518, 0.510 and 0.483, respectively.
The ROC curves of all the methods using the validation set are shown
in Fig. 14. The CNN-2D method demonstrated better predictive power
than the other models in terms of AUC. Specifically, the CNN-3D and
LeNet-5 methods achieved very similar AUC values of 0.806 and 0.807,
respectively, and the CNN-1D method obtained the lowest AUC value
of 0.799. Furthermore, a chi-square test was used to evaluate the signif-
icant difference of different prediction methods. If the chi-square value
was larger than 3.841 and the significant level value (p) was lower than
0.05, then the difference of the prediction methods was significant.
 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993
Fig. 12. Landslide susceptibility maps for different CNN prediction methods. (a) CNN-1D; (b) CNN-2D; (c) CNN-3D; (d) LeNet-5.
Table 5 lists the chi-square values and significant levels of different
CNNs. All the CNNs are very different because the chi-square and signif-
icant level values of these methods clearly satisfied the above threshold
conditions previously mentioned.
To further validate the effectiveness of the proposed CNNs, CNN-2D,
which demonstrated the best performance in the previous experiments,
was selected to be compared with several of the most popular ML and
DL methods. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are typically feed-forward
networks in which data flows from the input layer to the output layer
without looping back (CireşAn et al., 2012a). Initially, a DNN creates a
virtual neural unit map and connects these neural units by weighting
them. Then, the input data multiplies with the weights producing a
probability between 0 and 1. The selected DNN is a five-layer network
architecture including four hidden fully connected layers. The four hid-
den layers have 50, 30, 20 and 10 neural units. The output layer obtains
prediction results with two neural units, representing landslide and
non-landslide units, respectively. As a classical and robust model, the
SVM classifier with a radial basis function (RBF) kernel was used for
989
comparison. The optimal C (27) and γ (2−9) for SVM were obtained
using a five-fold cross validation ranging from 2−5 and 2−15 to 215
and 25, respectively. Fig. 15 presents the landslide susceptibility maps
of the DNN and SVM methods.
Table 6 lists the OA and MCC values of the three DL and SVM
methods. CNN-2D achieved the highest OA value of 77.63%, which is ap-
proximately 7% higher than that of the optimized SVM (70.18%),
followed by LeNet-5 and DNN with very similar OA values of 73.25%
and 71.05%, respectively. In terms of MCC, CNN-2D achieved a much
higher MCC value than that of the optimized SVM. For example, the
CNN-2D obtained the highest MCC value of 0.555, followed by the
LeNet-5, DNN and SVM with MCC values of 0.510, 0.421 and 0.404,
respectively.
Fig. 16 shows the ROC curves of all the methods using the validation
set. CNN-2D demonstrated better predictive power than the optimized
SVM in terms of AUC. Specifically, the two CNNs of CNN-2D and LeNet-5
achieved AUC values of 0.813 and 0.807, respectively, and DNN obtained
an AUC value approximately 0.8.
990 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993

Fig. 13. Percentages of different landslide susceptibility classes.

4.4. Parameter analysis
In this subsection, the impact of dropout manipulation to landslide
spatial prediction is initially discussed. Then, the influence of activation
functions in the CNN architecture is addressed. It should be noted that,
for simplicity, these parameters were analysed using CNN-2D.
In the first experiment, we constructed two networks for compari-
son and trained them using the same training set. The first network
structure was constructed using CNN-2D with two dropout manipula-
tions, which have dropout rates of 0.4 and 0.3, respectively. The second
network structure was built using the CNN-2D method without any
dropout manipulation. The plot of OA values obtained from the two net-
works is shown in Fig. 17. In this figure, the term “Epoch” implies the
number of times that the network is trained using the entire training
data. The OA value obtained from CNN-2D is shown to be effectively im-
proved by including a dropout manipulation after each convolutional
process in the network.
In the second experiment, two active functions of ReLU and tanh
were considered for comparison. The plot of OA values obtained using
CNN-2D with the two active functions is illustrated in Fig. 18. Although
the OA results obtained using CNN-2D with ReLU and tanh were not sta-
ble and oscillated, the CNN with ReLU achieved higher OA values than
those with tanh in most instances. In conclusion, the CNN with ReLU
as the activation function can produce more reliable prediction results.
and SVM classifiers in Yanshan Country, China. Furthermore, different
data representations converted from raw landslide data are presented
and fitted in the three proposed CNN architectures of CNN-1D, CNN-
2D and CNN-3D, respectively.
Before analysing landslide susceptibility, it is very important to as-
sess the predictive capability of all of the influencing factors. To achieve
this objective, multicollinearity analysis was used to estimate correla-
tions between these factors and the GR method was employed to rank
the importance of these factors. The multicollinearity analysis results re-
vealed that the STI factor has strong multicollinearity and should be re-
moved from the subsequent process. Regarding the results of the GR
method, the landuse and NDVI factors had higher AM values than the
other factors, indicating that the two factors were more important for
landslide occurrence. On the one hand, the FR values of the grass and
forest classes are much greater than the other three classes with regard
to the land use factor. On the other hand, NDVI can accurately display
surface vegetation coverage. It should be noted that landslides continue
to occur in mountainous areas due to rainfall and external forces, even
on slopes covered with significant vegetation.

5. Discussion

Landslides are very complex processes that are controlled by many

topographical and environmental factors. Moreover, LSM is of great sig-
nificance for analysing landslide prone areas in a visual way. Therefore,
the primary objective of this work is to apply CNN architectures for re-
gional landslide susceptibility analyses and compare them with DNN

Table 4
Performance of different methods.

Method OA value MCC

CNN-1D 74.12% 0.483

CNN-2D 77.63% 0.555
CNN-3D 75.88% 0.518
LeNet-5 73.25% 0.510
Fig. 14. ROC curves for all CNNs using the verification set.
 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993 991

Table 5 Table 6
Chi-square values and significant levels of different CNNs. Performance of different prediction methods.

Comparative pairs Chi-square value p value Significance level Method OA value MCC

CNN-1D vs CNN-2D 279.002 b 0.0001 Yes CNN-2D 77.63% 0.555

CNN-1D vs CNN-3D 276.312 b 0.0001 Yes LeNet-5 73.25% 0.510
CNN-1D vs LeNet-5 197.787 b 0.0001 Yes DNN 71.05% 0.421
CNN-2D vs CNN-3D 256.968 b 0.0001 Yes SVM 70.18% 0.404
CNN-2D vs LeNet-5 343.222 b 0.0001 Yes
CNN-3D vs LeNet-5 340.595 b 0.0001 Yes

For the selected landslide influencing factors, three CNN architec-

tures were constructed to compare with the conventional LeNet-5
method. CNN can effectively extract spatial information using local con-
nections and can significantly reduce the number of network parame-
ters by sharing weights. The architecture of CNN-1D could exploit the
local correction and gradually learn more intricate representations
from factor vectors. In the case of CNN-2D, because the CNN technique
initially exhibited excellent performance in the visual image analysis
field, we converted each one-dimensional factor vector to a two-
dimensional matrix to sufficiently extract the hidden valuable features.
Moreover, CNN-3D not only learns factor representations but also ex-
tracts local spatial information. The proposed CNNs obtained higher
OA and MCC values than those of LeNet-5, and they also achieved better
prediction performance than the most popular DNN and SVM classifiers
in the subsequent experiments. Finally, CNN-2D achieved the highest
AUC value of 0.813 using the validation set, which reveals that this
two-dimensional structure can effectively improve prediction perfor-
mance and may be a promising method for future studies.
Recently, many ML methods have been applied and compared for
landslide spatial prediction in a given area, including decision tree Fig. 16. ROC curves for four methods using the verification set.
(Chen et al., 2017c), logistic regression (Tsangaratos and Ilia, 2016),
artificial neural network (Chen et al., 2017a) and SVM (Chen et al.,
2018a). Additionally, different ensemble methods have been developed, and plays an increasingly important role in computer vision, imaging
including AdaBoost (Hong et al., 2018), bagging (Pham et al., 2017a) processing and natural language processing. The DL technique can
and rotation forest (Pham et al., 2018). The convolutional ML methods automatically explore the representation needed for prediction from
have a limited ability to process data in their raw form (LeCun et al., raw data. Therefore, it is promising to explore the probability of apply-
2015). However, the DL technique is a powerful improvement to ML ing powerful DL methods in landslide susceptibility assessments.

Fig. 15. Landslide susceptibility maps of DNN (a) and SVM (b).
992 Y. Wang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 666 (2019) 975–993
Fig. 17. OA values obtained using CNN-2D with and without dropout manipulations.
Furthermore, the three proposed data representation forms provide a
new way to handle raw landslide data. The experimental results
showed that CNN-2D is superior to the classical DL technique of DNN
and the conventional ML technique of SVM, which indicated that the
three proposed CNNs may be promising and robust techniques for LSM.
6. Conclusions
This work investigates the application of a CNN framework for LSM
in the case of Yanshan County, China. The framework is a useful meth-
odology that can be applied to other areas in the world with similar
characteristics. The proposed CNNs were validated in the study area
based on the analysis of sixteen influencing factors that were derived
from different ancillary data. The final landslide susceptibility maps of
the study area were obtained using these CNNs in comparison to the
conventional ML and DL methods of SVM, DNN and LeNet-5. The valida-
tion of the results was conducted on the basis of the objective measures
of OA, MCC, ROC and AUC. The experimental results confirmed the fol-
lowing conclusions. First, the landslide susceptibility maps obtained
using the proposed CNNs are more practical for landslide prevention
and management than those from conventional methods. Second, the
prediction results obtained using the proposed CNNs are better than
Fig. 18. OA values obtained using CNN-2D with ReLU and tanh activation functions.
or comparable to those of the optimized SVM in terms of OA, MCC and
AUC. Among the proposed CNNs, the CNN-2D method achieved the
highest OA, MCC and AUC values, and it can be used to produce reliable
landslide susceptibility maps. Finally, the prediction accuracies of LSM
using a CNN framework can be effectively improved through two strat-
egies: (1) the inclusion of a dropout manipulation after a convolutional
step when constructing the CNN architecture and (2) the selection of
ReLU as the activation function. In summary, CNNs are very promising
for landslide spatial prediction. In the future, our research will investi-
gate more efficient DL architectures for LSM.
Acknowledgements
We express our gratitude to Ralf Ludwig, editor of the journal Sci-
ence of the Total Environment, and the three anonymous reviewers
for their valuable comments and suggestions that improved the quality
of our paper. This work was supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (61271408).
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