Original Paper

Landslides
DOI 10.1007/s10346-016-0711-9
Received: 18 December 2015
Accepted: 8 April 2016
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016
Dieu Tien Bui I Tran Anh Tuan I Nhat-Duc Hoang I Nguyen Quoc Thanh I Duy Ba Nguyen I
Ngo Van Liem I Biswajeet Pradhan
Spatial prediction of rainfall-induced landslides
for the Lao Cai area (Vietnam) using a hybrid intelligent
approach of least squares support vector machines
inference model and artificial bee colony optimization

Abstract The main objective of this study is to produce a land-
slide susceptibility map for the Lao Cai area (Vietnam) using a new
hybrid intelligent method based on least squares support vector
machines (LSSVM) and artificial bee colony (ABC) optimization,
namely LSSVM-BC. LSSVM and ABC are state-of-the-art soft
computing techniques that have been rarely utilized in landslide
susceptibility assessment. LSSVM is adopted to develop landslide
prediction model whereas ABC was used to optimize the predic-
tion model by identifying an appropriate set of the LSSVM hyper-
parameters. To establish the hybrid intelligent method, a GIS
database with ten landslide-influencing factors and 340 landslide
locations that occurred mainly during the last 20-years was con-
structed. These historical landslide locations were collected from
the existing inventories that sourced from (i) five landslide pro-
jects carried out in this study areas before and (ii) interpretations
of SPOT satellite images with resolution of 2.5 m. The study area
was geographically split into two different parts, with landslides
located in the first part was used for building models whereas the
other landslides in the second part was used for the model valida-
tion. Performance of the LSSVM-BC model was assessed using the
receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and area under the
curve (AUC). Result shows that the prediction power of the model
is good with the area under the curve (AUC) = 0.900. Experiments
have pointed out the prediction power of the LSSVM-BC is better
than that obtained from the popular support vector machines.
Therefore, the proposed model is a promising tool for spatial
prediction of landslides at the study area. The landslide suscepti-
bility map is useful for landuse planning for the Lao Cai area.
Keywords Landslide . Artificial bee colony . Least squares support
vector machines . GIS . Lao Cai . Vietnam
Introduction
Although landslides in Vietnam occur in all mountainous regions,
the northern mountainous is, however, considered to be one of the
most landslide-prone regions in the country. It is evident that the
impact of landslides has escalated in recent years due to their
increasing frequency of occurrences, huge losses of human life,
property, and devastations to the environment caused by this
hazard (Tien Bui 2012a; Tien Bui et al. 2012d). In particular, in
the Lao Cai province, landslides have occurred widespread due to
its topographic characteristics and geographic position. These
landslides have mainly occurred during heavy rainfalls of tropical
typhoons, in steep sloping mountain sides, small and narrow
valleys, and across the road system. Based on a report by Yem
et al. (2006), damages due to landslides in the study area from 1965
to 2006 were 150 deaths and 361 houses being buried. Many large
landslides have occurred in this areas; for example, a large land-
slide (>10,000 m3) occurred at the Trung Chai area on 24 June 1998
killed eight, injured seven persons, and buried three houses. A
massive landslide, which occurred on 13 September 2004 at the
Sung Hoang area, caused 22 deaths and 16 casualties. Landslides
also happened across the national road 4D during heavy rainfalls
of the Kalmaegi tropical cyclone on 17 September 2014. Therefore,
detail studies on landslides are an urgent task in this area in order
to understand the failure mechanism so that necessary measures
can be taken to reduce loss caused by these disasters.
Based on recent literature, data mining and soft computing
methods are more appropriate when study area is large due
to availability of non-linear soft computing algorithms (i.e.,
Weka and R programming), and these models can be easily
integrated in geographical information system (GIS). From the
perspective of soft computing approaches, modeling of land-
slides can be formulated as regression problems or binary
classifications (Tien Bui et al. 2012a, c, 2015). The former is
may be less popular due to the limitation of prediction capa-
bility whereas the latter shows to be feasible and effective
tools (Cheng and Hoang 2014; Hoang and Tien Bui 2016). In
recent years, a large number of soft computing techniques
have been explored and suggested for spatial prediction of
landslides, such as logistic regression (Hong et al. 2015a;
Kavzoglu et al. 2014; Tien Bui et al. 2011), artificial neural
networks (Hong et al. 2015b; Tsangaratos and Ilia 2015; Yilmaz
2010), fuzzy instance-based learning (Cheng and Hoang 2014;
Tien Bui et al. 2016a), fuzzy unordered rule induction algo-
rithm (Tien Bui et al. 2014; Pham et al. 2016b), fuzzy k-means
classification (Gorsevski et al. 2003), neuron fuzzy (Pradhan
2013; Tien Bui et al. 2012c), decision trees (Tien Bui et al.
2013a; Yeon et al. 2010), Gaussian processes (Ching et al. 2011),
Bayesian networks (Song et al. 2012), kernel Fisher discrimi-
nant (He et al. 2012), support vector machines (Hong et al.
2016a; Pradhan 2013; Tien Bui et al. 2012a; Yao et al. 2008),
and relevance vector machines (Hoang and Tien Bui 2016).
Aforementioned literature review shows that support vector
machines are widely accepted to be effective and powerful
method for landslide modeling compared to the other men-
tioned methods and techniques.
Despite of many advantages, support vector machines feature
some drawbacks in handling complex problems with large datasets
due to the directly proportional of the matrix size of the quadratic
programming to the number of training samples (Suykens and
Vandewalle 1999). Therefore, a modification of support vector
machines was proposed to overcome these limitations, namely
least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) (Suykens and

Landslides
 Original Paper
Vandewalle 1999). Based on the current literature, LSSVM has
seldom been used in landslide susceptibility modeling, especially
at regional scale (Tien Bui et al. 2016b). Therefore, in this study, we
aimed at filling this gap in the literature by developing LSSVM
model and evaluating its performance for the spatial prediction of
landslides at the Lao Cai area of Vietnam. Since the overall per-
formance of LSSVM model is dependent on the choice of the
regularization and kernel parameters, the process of searching
for an appropriate pair of such parameters for the study area plays
an important role and is widely considered as an optimization
problem in soft computing. In this study, artificial bee colony
(Karaboga and Basturk 2007) that is one of the most recently
introduced metaheuristic optimization techniques for determining
the tuning parameters of LSSVM is used. The artificial bee colony
(ABC) was selected because it outperforms other metaheuristic
techniques such as genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization,
and differential evolution (Karaboga and Akay 2009).
The difference between this study and the aforementioned
literature is that a new hybrid intelligent approach based on
LSSVM and ABC (named as LSSVM-BC) was proposed for spatial
prediction of landslides. The rest of the paper is organized as
follows: the second section presents theoretical background of
LSSVM and ABC; the third section introduces description of the
study area and GIS data; the proposed LSSVM-BC model is de-
scribed in the fourth section; results are shown in the fifth section;
and the conclusion remarks are in the final section. The processing
and visualization of influencing factors and susceptibility maps
were carried out using the ArcGIS 10.2 and the SAGA GIS. LSSVM
algorithm is available in the LS-SVMLab v1.8 Toolbox (De
Brabanter et al. 2011), and LSSVM-BC model is programed by the
authors in Matlab®2014b. Sensitive analysis for the landslide-
influencing factors was carried out using the SAFE Toolbox
(Pianosi and Wagener 2015).
Theoretical background of methods used
Least squares support vector machines
LSSVM is a machine learning technique used to construct classi-
fiers on the basis of the concept of structural risk minimization
which is less prone to overfitting than the empirical risk minimi-
zation employed by artificial neural network learning approach
(Bishop 2006). Given a training dataset {xk, yk}k = 1N with input
data xk ∈ Rn where N is the number of training data points, n is the
data dimension, and the corresponding class labels is denoted as
yk ∈ {−1, + 1}, the formulation of the LSSVM for classification can
be stated as the following constrained optimization problem
(Suykens et al. 2002):
1 X 2
N
1 T
Minimize J p ðw; eÞ ¼ w w þ γ e ð1Þ
2 2k ¼ 1 k
 
Subjected to yk wT φðxk Þ þ b ¼ 1 − ek ; k ¼ 1; …; N ð2Þ
where w ∈ Rn is the normal vector to the classification hyper-
plane, and b ∈ R is the bias; ek ∈ R represents error variables;
Landslides
γ > 0 denotes a regularization constant.The resulting LSSVM-
based classification model can be shown as follows:
!
X
N
yðxÞ ¼ sign αk yi K ðxk ; xi Þ þ b ; K ðxk ; xi Þ
k ¼ 1
 
kxk − xi k2
¼ exp − ð3Þ
2σ2
where αk and b are the solution to the linear system; K(xk, xi) is a
kernel function, and in this study, the popular radial basis function
(RBF) kernel is used (Pham et al. 2016a; Tien Bui et al. 2015; Were
et al. 2015); σ denotes the kernel function parameter.
It is noted that there are two tuning parameters (γ, σ) that
should to be properly set in construction of the LSSVM model.
The regularization parameter (γ) has the role of weighting the
importance of classification errors. On the other hand, the kernel
parameter (σ) influences the smoothness of the classification
boundary.
Artificial bee colony optimization
The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is a novel swarm-based
optimization technique that can effectively solve global optimiza-
tion problems (Karaboga et al. 2014). This algorithm was inspired
by the typical foraging behavior of honeybees and has attracted a
wide attention from the academic community because of its sim-
plicity, flexibility, and desirable performance (Cheng and Hoang
2015). ABC takes into account of three kinds of honeybees, namely
employed bees, onlooker bees, and scout bees for carrying out the
searching process. In general, an iteration of ABC optimization
algorithm contains four steps: food source initialization, employed
bee phase, onlooker bee phase, and scout bee phase as follows:
(1) Food source initialization: ABC algorithm commences the
searching process by generating an NFS number of food
source positions in a random manner. One artificial bee is
allowed to target one food-source position. NFS is a constant
during the whole searching process. The following equation is
used to generate a solution:
 
xi; j ¼ LB j þ UB j − LB j : rand ð0; 1Þ ð4Þ
where xi,j represents a food source position; LBj and UBj are the
lower and upper boundaries of the jth element in the vector xi,j,
respectively; rand(0,1) denotes a uniform random number be-
tween 0 and 1.
(2) Employed bee phase: Each employed bee selects a new food
source position in the feasible space based on the vicinity of
the previously selected food source. A candidate solution ui,j
can be generated from the previous solution xi,j using the
following equation:
 
ui; j ¼ xi; j þ ϕi; j xi; j − xk; j ð5Þ
where ϕi,j represents a random number in the range of [−1, 1].
(3) Onlooker bee phase: Employed bees return to their hive and
share food source information with onlooker bees. Based on
the shared information, the onlooker bee chooses a food
source depending on the probability value pi associated with
that food source which is calculated in the following manner:
.X
N FS
pi ¼ f it i f it k ð6Þ
k¼1
where fiti and fitk denote the fitness values of the ith and jth food
sources, respectively.
(4) Scout bee phase: If the fitness of a food source cannot help to
enhance the food quality during a specified number of con-
secutive iterations, the food source is abandoned by its bee
and substituted with a new food source. The position of the
new food source is then discovered by a scout bee that can be
generated using Eq. 4.
Description of the study area and GIS data
Geographic setting and illustration of study area
The study area (Fig. 1) is situated in the northwest mountainous
area of the Lao Cai province of Vietnam, and covers an area of
around 1946 km2 with three administrative units, including the
Lao Cai city, and the Sa Pa and the Bat Xat districts. It is located to
the southwest of the Thao River and to the northeast of the Hoang
Lien Son mountain range, between longitudes 103° 32′ E and 104°
05′ E, and latitudes 22° 08′ N and 22° 48′ N. The topography is
strongly dissected in both the horizontal and vertical causing
strong relief amplitudes. The altitude varies from 200 m at the
Fig. 1 Location of the study area and landslide locations
Thao River valley to over 3000 m above sea level on the strip of the
Hoang Lien Son mountain range where the altitude is of 3143 m at
the Fansipan peak (the highest altitude in Vietnam).
The study area is located in the highly precipitation zone of the
Hoang Lien Son mountain range where the total annual rainfall is
between 2000 to 3600 mm. The rainfall concentrates in June, July,
and August that accounts for around 80–85 % of the total annual
rainfall. The Lao Cai area has a high drainage density (around
1.75 km/km2) where the Thao is the largest river. There are two
distinctive flow patterns that correspond to the flood and drought
seasons. The flood season is from May to October where the flow is
highest; the water flow in this season accounts for 50–60 % of the
annual quantity.
Geologically, the rock types comprise of heterogeneous crust
due to the multiple phases of the Indosinian orogeny (Trinh et al.
2012). The stratigraphic units hence contain sedimentary, meta-
morphic, and igneous rocks with different ages. Two groups of the
acid neural magmatic rocks and metamorphic rocks account for
86.8 % of the total study area. The study area is located in the
region that has two tectonic movement phases; the left-lateral
movement occurs in Oligocene-Miocene whereas the right-lateral
strike-slip probably began in the Pliocene (Trinh et al. 2012). The
Red River fault and the Dien Bien Phu fault in the second phase
are relatively fast movement with the first one is a major tectonic
feature that separates the South China and Indochina blocks
(Zuchiewicz et al. 2013). The tectonic activities of this fault are
considered as the main cause for the high landslide frequency in
this study area.
Historical landslide records
Landslide inventory map (Fig. 1) for this study was constructed
based on landslide locations from several sources as follows: (i)
BInvestigation and Assessment of the types of Geological Hazard
Landslides
 Original Paper
in the Territory of Vietnam and Recommendation of Remedial
Measures. Phase II: A Study of the Northern Mountainous Prov-
ince of Vietnam^ (Hue et al. 2004); (ii) BAssessment of landslides
and debris flows at some prone mountainous areas of Vietnam
and recommendation of remedial measure^ (Yem et al. 2006); (iii)
BAssessment of landslide hazards along the national road 4D
focusing on the relationship between geologic structures and
topology^ (Ngoi and Ha 2008); (iv) BStudying to determine causes
of landslides in the area of the Mong Sen bridge, Lao Cai province^
(Duan et al. 2011); (v) BStatistical and heuristic approaches for
spatial prediction of landslide hazards in Lao Cai, Vietnam^
(QuocPhi et al. 2012); (iv) Interpretation of seven space borne
satellite images captured by the SPOT5 with 2.5-m resolution.
These images are in the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM)
projection system and zone 48N that acquired in 2009. The inter-
pretation was carried out at Vietnam Academy of Science and
Technology in 2014, including extensive field surveys.
A total of 340 landslide locations were identified and mapped.
They are mostly soil-mixed-boulder slides, and rainfall is the
factor that has triggered them. Rock falls and topples are exclud-
ed in this analysis because failure mechanisms are different.
Statistical analysis of the landslide data shows that the size of
the largest landslide covers an area of about 65,483.9 m2 whereas
the smallest one is around 417 m2. Large landslides (>10,000 m2)
account for 11 % whereas medium landslides (1000–10,000 m2)
account for 65.6 % of the total number of landslides. Around
23.4 % of the landslides have their sizes less than 1000 m2. Two
example pictures of large landslides in the study area are shown
in Fig. 1a, b.
Landslide-influencing factors
Lithology is widely identified as an important influencing factor
for the occurrences of slope failures because the variation of
lithological structures often affects the strength parameters and
permeability of materials forming slopes (Ayalew and Yamagishi
2005; Pham et al. 2015). Geological map of the study area was
constructed using the digital geological and mineral resource
maps at the scale of 1:200,000. The map is mostly covered by
quaternary deposits, twelve formations, and six complexes. Based
on clay composition, strength parameters, and degree of
weathering (Tien Bui et al. 2012b), the lithological map of the study
area was classified into seven groups (Fig. 2a).
Distance to geological boundaries map (Fig. 2b) was construct-
ed based on buffering polylines of geological boundaries using
ArcGIS 10.2 software. These boundary polylines were extracted
from the geological map and were shown in Fig. 3. This factor
was selected because the geologic boundary largely relates to the
strength of the rock mass and thus influencing the slope instability
(Dou et al. 2015). The closer to the boundary, the lower the slope
stability is.
Landuse change is considered as an important factor influenc-
ing the slope instability due to clear-cut logging and new settle-
ments toward highland with inappropriate landuse practices (Tien
Bui et al. 2011). In addition, slope stability is also affected by
hydrological and mechanical properties due to ground cover by
vegetation, especially woody types with strong and large root
systems (Dai and Lee 2002). Furthermore, landslides may occur
in unvegetated land (Garcia-Rodriguez et al. 2008); therefore,
landuse map was used in this study. The landuse map with 12
Landslides
classes (Fig. 2c) was constructed based on the digital landuse map
of the Lao Cai province at scale 1:50.000 that was produced by the
Forest Inventory and Planning Institute of Vietnam in 2010.
Slope failure is directly associated with the characteristics of
topography (Clague and Stead 2012); therefore, topographic relat-
ed factors should be taken into account. In this study, a digital
elevation model (DEM) with a spatial resolution of 20 × 20 m was
generated from eight national digital topographic maps at scale
1:50.000. Interval for contour lines of these topographic maps is
5 m for areas with slopes from 0–2°, 10 m for areas with slopes 2–
15°, and 20 m for areas with slopes larger than 15°. Using the DEM,
seven geomorphometric factors were extracted as follows: slope,
aspect, relief amplitude, valley depth, topographic wetness index
(TWI), stream power index (SPI), and sediment transport capacity
index (STC).
Slope is an important component in landslide analysis be-
cause slope relates to shear stresses acting on the displacement
of hill slopes, and when the thickness of soil layer is sufficient,
the higher degrees of slope is, the more unstable the slope is (Dai
and Lee 2002). The slope in degree unit for each grid-cell in this
study is calculated as the maximum rate of change from that
grid-cell to its neighbors based on a 3 × 3 kernel (Burrough and
McDonnell 2011). Slope map for this study was constructed with
six categories (Fig. 2d). Aspect is the steepest downslope direc-
tion for each grid-cell and is measured clockwise from 0 to 360°
(Wise 2013). Aspect is widely used landslide susceptibility assess-
ment because it influences soil moistures, weathering, and vege-
tation of terrain due to precipitation, wind, and solar radiations
(Magliulo et al. 2008). Aspect map with ten classes was construct-
ed for this study (Fig. 2e). Relief amplitude is defined as the
difference between the highest and lowest points in a terrain unit
(Gunaratne 2013), and is an important influencing factor of
landslides (Tien Bui et al. 2012a, b). In this study, the relief
amplitude map (Fig. 2f) was constructed with six classes using
the focal statistic tool in ArcGIS 10.1.
Valley depth, which is a difference in elevation between the
pixel and the upstream ridge, is an important component in
slope instability analysis because the increasing of upslope area
could provide material to load the slope (Cossart et al. 2014;
Meinhardt et al. 2015; Hong et al. 2016b). The valley depth map
for this study was constructed with six classes using the SAGA
GIS software (Fig. 2g). Topographic wetness index (TWI) is an
indicator of soil moisture that plays a critical role for most types
of landslide. It is because the soil strength will be reduced with
the increasing of pore water pressure, which is the main cause
that initiates slope failures (Ray and Jacobs 2007). The TWI is
calculated as TWI = ln(a / tanβ) (Beven et al. 1984), where a is
the local upslope contributing area that indicates the amount of
water flowing to a specific location; tanβ is the local slope. The
TWI map for the study area was constructed with six classes
(Fig. 2h). Stream power index (SPI) is an indicator of the erosive
power of flowing water, thickness of soil horizons, organic mat-
ter, silt and sand content that influence the occurrence of slope
failure (Moore et al. 1991). SPI has been used widely for assess-
ment of erosions and landslides (Costanzo et al. 2012) and is
calculated as: SPI = Astanβ, where As is the specific catchment
area; β is the local slope (Moore et al. 1991). SPI map (Fig. 2i) for
the study area was constructed with six classes. Sediment trans-
port capacity index (STC) is an indicator that represents
Fig. 2 (a) Lithology; (b) Distance to geological boundaries; (c) Landuse; (d) Slope; (e) Aspect map; (f) Relief amplitude; (g) Valley depth; (h) TWI; (i) SPI; and (j) STC. RFL
rehabilitated forest land, RSL residential land, BFL bamboo forest land, PFL planted forest land, HDF high degraded forest land, TFL timber forest land, MDF
medium degraded forest land, WS water surface land, AGL agricultural land, BRL barren land, MFL mixed forest land, RM rocky mountains, MRQ metamorphic rock
with rich quartz component, QTD quaternary deposits, MRA metamorphic rock with rich aluminosilicate component, SAQ sedimentary aluminosilicate rocks and
sedimentary quartz rocks, AMR acid–neutral magmatic rocks, SCR sedimentary carbonate rocks, MUR mafic–ultramafic magma rocks

movement ability of rock and soil materials through the process-
es of rolling and sliding on the ground surface (Prosser and
Rustomji 2000); therefore, it may influence the occurrence of
landslide. The STC can be estimated using the following equa-
tion: STC = (As / 22.13)0.6 (sinβ / 0.0896)1.3, where As is the spe-
cific catchment area; β is the local slope. STC map for the study
area was constructed with six classes (Fig. 2j).
The proposed LSSVM-BC model for spatial prediction of rainfall-
induced landslides
The methodological flow chart of the proposed LSSVM-BC is
shown in Fig. 3 in which the landslide model was constructed by
hybridizing the LSSVM and the ABC optimization.
The detail procedures of the integrated framework that hybrid-
izes LSSVM and ABC methods are described as follows:

Fig. 3 The methodological flow chart of the proposed LSSVM-BC for this study

Landslides
 Original Paper
(1) Input data: The historical landslide dataset employed in this
research, consisting of 334 landslide polygons, corresponds to
3960 landslide pixels. The landslide polygon dataset was geo-
graphically divided into two region subsets (Chung and
Fabbri 2008) (Fig .1), with the first one (247 landslides in the
pink color, 3315 pixels) was used for building models and the
other (87 landslides in the yellow color, 645 pixels) was used
for the model validation. The same amounts of pixels in non-
landslide area were sampled to build the training and valida-
tion datasets. For this purpose, features of the ten influencing
factors were converted from categorical classes into continu-
ous values within the range of (0.01, 0.99) by employing the
frequency ratio method (Tien Bui et al. 2015). It is noted that
these landslide and Bnon-landslide^ pixels are denoted as B1^
and B−1^, respectively.
(2) Parameter initialization: As stated above, the training phase
of LSSVM is influenced by the regularization parameter (γ)
and the kernel function parameter (σ). Therefore, in the
proposed landslide prediction model, ABC algorithm is
employed to search the most desirable parameters. At the
first searching iteration, these two parameters are randomly
generated within their lower and upper boundaries using Eq.
4.
(3) Training least squares support vector machines model: Since
LSSVM is a supervised learning technique, a training dataset
with input factors and corresponding desired class labels
must be provided. Based on the training dataset, LSSVM
maps the input data from the original input space into a high
dimensional feature space using RBF kernel function. Ac-
cordingly, the algorithm constructs a hyperplane that can
separate the input data of influencing factors into two dis-
tinctive decision regions: Blandslide^ (Y = 1) and Bnon
landslide^ (Y = −1). When the training process is accom-
plished, the resulting LSSVM for classifying input patterns is
demonstrated in form of Eq. 3.
(4) Artificial bee colony optimization: ABC manipulates the
existing population of artificial bees through the employed
bee, onlooker bee, and scout bee phases in each searching
iteration. Based on these phases, artificial bees are guided to
pursue better solutions manifested as food sources. By eval-
uating the fitness of each solution, the algorithm gradually
explores the solution space and seeks for the most desirable
set of model’s parameters.
(5) Evaluation of fitness: Since the performance of the model
in the training process alone may not be sufficient to
indicate a good model due to the problem of over-fitting.
It is noted that an over-fitted model simply memorizes
the input–output mapping provided in the training
dataset instead of generalizing it. As a consequence, the
model may classify the training set very well, but poorly
predict new input patterns which are not included in the
training set. Thus, to construct a desirable classification
model, the fivefold cross-validation technique is
employed in this research. Using this approach, the train-
ing dataset is separated into five mutually exclusive data
folds. In each run, a proportion 4/5 of the available data
is used to establish the LSSVM classifier; meanwhile, a
proportion 1/5 of the data is reserved as a validating set
for verifying the model performance. The model’s
Landslides
predictive capability is assessed via the average result of
the cross-validation process. Since the objective is to
maximize the AUC computed from the model’s predic-
tion results, this study employs the following fitness
function:
X
5
X5
5 5
f Fitness ¼ i
þ i
ð7Þ
i ¼ 1 AUC TR i ¼ 1 AUC VA
where AUCTRi and AUCVAi are AUC values calculated from the
classifier’s performance in the training and validating phases,
respectively.
(6) Final model and calculating landslide susceptibility index:
ABC-based optimization process will be terminated when
the current iteration exceeds the maximum number of gen-
erations. Accordingly, LSSVM-BC has identified the most
desirable classification model accompanied by the optimized
set of tuning parameters (γ and δ). The proposed model is
ready to predict unseen input patterns in the validation
dataset.
Results and discussion
Training and validation of the LSSVM-BC model
Since a proper setting of the regularization parameter (γ) and
the kernel function parameter (σ) of LSSVM is necessary to
attain a desirable outcome with a balance between the model
accuracy and the model complexity, in this work, ABC algo-
rithm was used for the optimization process, and the best
LSSVM-BC model was found with the optimized pair of γ
and σ as 802.853 and 1.862, respectively. Confusion matrices
that produced by LSSVM-BC model are shown in Table 1. It
could be observed that LSSVM-BC model has high classifica-
tion performance on the both datasets; overall accuracies are
93.8 and 81.5 % for the training and validation datasets,
respectively.
User’s accuracy that was used to estimate classification accura-
cy for each class shows that the accuracies for landslide and non-
landslide in the training dataset are almost equal with only a 3 %
difference. However, user’s accuracy for the non-landslide class in
the validation dataset is higher than that obtained from the land-
slide class (Table 1).
The ROC curve and AUC for LSSVM-BC model are shown
in Fig. 4a. It could be seen that the curve on the training
dataset is closer to the left top corner than the curve on the
validation dataset. From the ROC curves, we estimated the
AUC as an indicator of global summary measure of perfor-
mance of the LSSVM-BC model. In addition, two related
evaluation statistics, the standard error (Std. error) and the
confidence interval (CI) at 95 %, are included. It could be
observed that the Std. errors are reasonably small whereas the
CIs are relative narrow (Fig. 4a). The AUC is 0.984 for the
training dataset indicating a high goodness-of-fit of the model
with the training dataset, whereas the prediction capability is
high where the AUC is 0.900; hence, the LSSVM-BC model
performs very much higher than a random model.
Table 1 Confusion matrices produced by the LSSVM-BC model
LSSVM-BC model Landslide Non landslide User’s accuracy (%)
Training dataset Landslide 3059 256 92.3
Non landslide 155 3160 95.3
Overall accuracy = 93.8 %
Validation dataset Landslide 455 190 70.5
Non landslide 49 596 92.4
Overall accuracy = 81.5 %

Comparison of the proposed LSSVM-BC with benchmark method
The performance of the LSSVM-BC model was compared to a
landslide model that derived from popular support vector
machines (SVM) method using the same training and validation
datasets. SVM is selected as a benchmark method because it is
considered to be an efficient method for spatial prediction of
landslides (Ballabio and Sterlacchini 2012; Micheletti et al. 2014;
Yao et al. 2008), and in general, SVM outperforms conventional
methods (Tien Bui et al. 2013b). For the implementation of
SVM, the radial basis function and the grid search method were
used as suggested by Tien Bui et al. (2015). The result shows that
the optimal regularization parameter (γ) and the kernel func-
tion parameter (σ) for this study area are 9.523 and 2.315,
respectively.

Fig. 4 (a) ROC curves of the LSSVM-BC model; (b) prediction curves; and (b) cost curves of the LSSVM-BC model and the SVM model

Landslides
 Original Paper
The overall classification is 95.9 % for the training dataset and
80.2 % for the validation dataset indicating high classification per-
formance. Prediction capabilities of the LSSVM-BC model and the
SVM model are shown in Fig. 4b. It could be seen that the prediction
power of the LSSVM-BC model is slightly better than those obtained
from the benchmark model. The optimal operation points (decision
threshold) of the two models are marked by the circles in the graph
(Fig. 4b); TP = 87.0 and FP = 18.3 are for the LSSVM-BC model;
TP = 82.5 and FP = 13.8 are for the SVM model.
Fig. 5 Landslide susceptibility map for the Lao Cai area using the LSSVM-BC model
Landslides
To analyze and compare misclassification costs of the two
models, we used the cost curve method (Corominas et al. 2014)
that has been proposed recently for further evaluations of the
classification results. The cost curves for the two landslide models
were constructed based on the normalized expected cost (the y-
axis) versus probability cost function (x-axis) in which the former
explains for the classification performance, whereas the latter
represents the operating points. The lower the normalized expect-
ed cost value, the better the landslide model; moreover, the
difference between the prediction powers of the two landslide
models is measured by the vertical distance between the two
curves. Figure 4c shows the two cost curves of the two landslide
models in this study. It could be seen that the two cost curves are
completely fall in the triangular area indicating that the two
landslide models always perform very much higher than a random
trivial model. Normalized expected costs of the LSSVM-BC model
are generally lower than those of the SVM model, indicating that
the LSSVM-BC model is better.
Since the LSSVM-BC model has obtained the best perfor-
mances, the model was utilized to calculate susceptibility index
for all the pixels in the study area and then exported to ArcGIS to
generate the final landslide susceptibility map (Fig. 5). The sus-
ceptible classes for the map were determined by overlaying the
landslide inventory map with the susceptibility index map, and
five susceptibility classes were obtained: very high (10 %), high
(15 %), moderate (15 %), low (20 %), and very low (40 %) (Pradhan
2013; Tien Bui et al. 2015).
Sensitive analysis of the LSSVM-BC model using the Fourier amplitude
sensitivity test
In order to evaluate how the variations in output of the LSSVM-BC
model could be apportioned to changes in the ten landslide-
influencing factors, sensitive analysis should be carried out. The
sensitivity analysis could help to explore the model behavior
through the quantification of the influence of uncertain factors
Fig. 6 Variance-based sensitive analysis of the LSSVM-BC model using Fourier amplitude sensitivity test (FAST) and contributions of influencing factors to the LSSVM-BC
model. RA relief amplitude, VD valley depth, Dist Geol distance to geological boundary
on the variability of the model’s output (Pianosi and Wagener
2015; Pianosi and Raso 2012; Pianosi et al. 2016). In this study,
Fourier amplitude sensitivity test (FAST) (Cukier et al. 1973; Saltelli
et al. (2008); Pianosi et al. (2015); Sarrazin et al. (2016a)), which is
considered to be one of the most widely used sensitivity analysis
techniques, was used. FAST is selected due to its computationally
efficient capacity, and the test can work well with nonlinear and
complex models. Detailed explanations of FAST can be found in
Saltelli et al. (2008).
Using FAST, the variation of the LSSVM-BC model output was
decomposed into partial variances of the ten influencing factors
through a Fourier transformation. The first-order sensitivity index
(FOSI) or main effect index for landslide-influencing factor
xi; i = 1, …, 10 is estimated as follows:
.
Si ¼ V xi V ðYÞ ð8Þ
where V(Y) is the total variance of the LSSVM-BC model outcome;
V xi is the variance based first-order effect of xi.
The result of FAST analysis for this study is shown in Fig. 6. It
could be seen that slope has the highest FOSI (91.76 %); therefore,
it is the most important factor that affects the LSSVM-BC model
(Fig. 6a). Since Fig. 6a provides a lumped estimation of sensitive
index for all samples in the training dataset, it does not provide
information if these sensitivity indices are affected by sample sizes.
Landslides
 Original Paper
Therefore, we randomly separated the training dataset into smaller
subsets such as 80, 60, 50, and 40 % of the total training samples,
and then, the FOSIs for the ten influencing factors were calculated
(Fig. 6b, c, d, and e). It could be seen that the slope has the highest
contribution to the model behavior in all the cases. It is reasonable
because the slope is widely accepted to be the most important
factor that influences the landslide susceptibility (Costanzo et al.
2012).
Since the FOSI estimates only the main effect of each landslide-
influencing factor on the variance of the LSSVM-BC model output,
it does not take into account of the interactions among these
factors; therefore, the contribution of each influencing factor to
the LSSVM-BC model was further calculated using an omitting
parameter technique. We selected the AUC for the omitting tech-
nique because the AUC is a global measure of the model perfor-
mance. The difference between the AUC of a landslide model when
an influencing factor was omitted, and the AUC of the full LSSVM-
BC model was used to quantify the contribution of these factors.
This is an iterative process, and the result is shown Fig. 6f.
It could be seen that all the factors have a certain contribution
to the model; however, the slope has a much higher contribution
than the other factors, followed by TWI and STC. This is reason-
able result because topography in the study area is very complex
and contains high elevation as well as steep slopes. The landuse is
another factor that has a high contribution (9.6 %) to the LSSVM-
BC model. This is because the study area has a high level of
deforestation with an inappropriate landuse management (Van
Nguyen et al. 2013) that causes a reduction of the vegetation cover;
thus, areas with bare land have expanded up to 36.04 %.
Concluding remarks
Landslides in the Lao Cai area (Vietnam) have received a consid-
erable attention during the last decade due to large losses of
human life, infrastructural damage, and environmental devasta-
tion. However, studies of landslides in this area are still limited.
The previous analyses have mainly focused on specific slope fail-
ures or investigated landslides along several road sections. Al-
though a national project was conducted by Yem et al. (2006),
they focused mainly on the investigation of large landslides.
Therefore, a comprehensive study of landslide susceptibility is an
urgent task that could help local planners and decision makers in
disaster planning and management. The result could be used later
for risk assessment.
This study addressed this problem by producing a susceptibility
map for the Lao Cai area using 334 landslide locations and ten
influencing factors, which include lithology, distance to geological
boundaries, landuse, slope, aspect, relief aptitude, valley depth,
TWI, SPI, and STC factors. A hybrid intelligent method that
integrates the LSSVM and ABC algorithms was proposed; based
on the current literature, this is the first time that this hybrid
framework was used for evaluating landslide susceptibility assess-
ment. The proposed model yields desirable performance results in
both training and validation phases. The prediction power of the
LSSVM-BC is 90 % indicating a satisfactory result. The collection
and processing processes of data have been carried out success-
fully where all the ten factors have positive correlations to slope
failures in which the strongest one is the slope, followed by the
landuse, the distance to geological boundaries, and the relief
amplitude factors.
Landslides
Visual interpretation of the susceptibility maps show that prob-
ability of landslides is also high for some slope areas in the Lao Cai
city (Fig. 5a). High probability of landslide is also for slope areas at
the Thanh Phu commune (Fig. 5b), the Muong Hum commune,
and the Ban Xeo commune (Fig. 5). Probability of landslide is
especially high for some slope areas along the national road 4D
and the road Thanh Phu-Ta Van. Therefore, these areas should be
received higher priority for the development of the landslide
remedial measures.
Other contributions of this work to the body knowledge are as
follows: (i) the hybrid use of LSSVM and ABC provide a new tool
for spatial prediction and mapping of landslides. It is worth to
mention that optimal parameters for the LSSVM model could be
determined automatically with the use of ABC optimization; and
(ii) prediction capability of the LSSVM-BC model has slightly
better than those obtained from the popular SVM as a benchmark
method. Therefore, the LSSVM-BC model is an efficient and pow-
erful method which can be used in landslide susceptibility
assessment.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Vietnam Academy of Science
and Technology (VAST), the grant project code is VAST05.02/14–
15. The modeling process was carried out at the Geographic Infor-
mation System group, University College of Southeast Norway.
The first author would like to thank Dr. Francesca Pianosi (De-
partment of Civil Engineering, University of Bristol, England) for
sending the SAFE Toolbox for the sensitive analysis.
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