Xianyu Yu

Landslides are one of the most common natural hazards in China, and the efficient screening of important factors is crucial for landslide susceptibility mapping. Taking the Zigui–Badong section of the Three Gorges Reservoir Area (TGRA) as the study area, this research initially selected 25 evaluation factors based on topography, geology, hydrology, remote sensing images, and previous studies. Thirteen key factors were obtained through analysis. Three machine learning models—RF, DT, and XGBoost—were then used for landslide susceptibility mapping, with SHAP and LIME employed to interpret the models. Finally, a scoring method was used to rank the six sets of results and compare them with those from the traditional AUC-based Recursive Feature Elimination (AUC-RFE) method. The results showed that the core factor sets screened by interpretable methods outperformed those from AUC-RFE. To further obtain accurate core factor sets, two additional interpretable methods—PI and Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM)—were integrated, ultimately identifying a core factor set consisting of eight factors including Elevation, Slope Height, and Aspect. This set achieved an AUC value of 0.931, only 0.003 lower than that of the 13 filtered factors. The screening method proposed in this paper can significantly improve the efficiency of factor acquisition, reduce the difficulty of factor acquisition, and provide a new approach for the selection of key factors in landslide susceptibility assessment.

The rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) has driven a strong need for optimizing locations of electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs). Previous methods for locating EVCSs rely on statistical and optimization models, but these methods have limitations in capturing complex nonlinear relationships and spatial dependencies among factors influencing EVCS locations. To address this research gap and better understand the spatial impacts of urban activities on EVCS placement, this study presents a spatially aware machine learning (SAML) method that combines a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) model with a spatial loss function to optimize EVCS sites. Additionally, the method uses the Shapley additive explanation (SHAP) technique to investigate nonlinear relationships embedded in EVCS placement. Using the city of Wuhan as a case study, the SAML method reveals that parking site (PS), road density (RD), population density (PD), and commercial residential (CR) areas are key factors in determining optimal EVCS sites. The SAML model classifies these grid cells into no EVCS demand (0 EVCS), low EVCS demand (from 1 to 3 EVCSs), and high EVCS demand (4+ EVCSs) classes. The model performs well in predicting EVCS demand. Findings from ablation tests also indicate that the inclusion of spatial correlations in the model’s loss function significantly enhances the model’s performance. Additionally, results from case studies validate that the model is effective in predicting EVCSs in other metropolitan cities.

Landslides, recognized as a significant global natural disaster, necessitate an exploration of the impact of various resolution types in sampling strategies on Landslide Susceptibility Mapping (LSM) results. This study focuses on the segment from Zigui to Badong within the Three Gorges Reservoir Area, utilizing two resolution types: sampling resolution and spatial resolution, The Support Vector Machine (SVM) is employed to obtain LSM results, which are then analyzed using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, specific category accuracy and statistical methods. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) were used to verify the reliability of the results. Additionally, five common machine learning models, including Logistic Regression (LR), are used to conduct experiments on four sampling resolutions (10 m,30 m,50 m and 70 m) to further investigate the effect of sampling resolution on LSM results. These are evaluated using a comprehensive quantitative method. The results reveal that increasing spatial resolution improves the prediction accuracy, while increasing sampling resolution produces a contrary effect. Furthermore, the impact of spatial resolution on LSM results is more pronounced than that of sampling resolution. Finally, Fanjiaping landslide and Huangtupo landslide are selected as references for comparative analysis, with the results aligning with engineering reality.

The authors would like to make the following corrections about the published paper

The Zigui–Badong section of the Three Gorges Reservoir area is used as the research area in this study to research the impact of unbalanced sample sets on Landslide Susceptibility Mapping (LSM) and determine the sample ratio interval with the best performance for different models. We employ 12 LSM factors, five training sample sets with different sample ratios (1:1, 1:2, 1:4, 1:8, and 1:16), and C5.0, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), and one-dimensional Convolution Neural Network (CNN) models are used to obtain landslide susceptibility index and landslide susceptibility zoning in the study area, respectively. The prediction performance of the model is evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic curve area under the curve value, five statistical methods, and specific category precision. The results show that the CNN, SVM, and LR models in the sample ratio of 1:2 achieve better performance than on the balanced sample set, which indicates the importance of the unbalanced sample set in training the LSM modeling. The C5.0 model is always in a state of overfitting in this study and needs to be further studied. The conclusions put forward in this study help improve the scientificity and reliability of LSM.

Landslides pose a great threat to the safety of people’s lives and property within disaster areas. In this study, the Zigui to Badong section of the Three Gorges Reservoir is used as the study area, and the land use (LU), land use change (LUC) and band math (band) factors from 2016–2020 along with six selected commonly used factors are used to form a land use factor combination (LUFC), land use change factor combination (LUCFC) and band math factor combination (BMFC). An artificial neural network (ANN), a support vector machine (SVM) and a convolutional neural network (CNN) are chosen as the three models for landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM). The results show that the BMFC is generally better than the LUFC and the LUCFC. For the validation set, the highest simple ranking scores for the three models were obtained for the BMFC (37.2, 32.8 and 39.2), followed by the LUFC (28, 26.6 and 31.8) and the LUCFC (26.8, 28.6 and 20); that is, the band-based predictions are better than those based on the LU and LUC, and the CNN model provides the best prediction ability. According to the four groups of experimental results with ANNs, compared with LU and LUC, band is easier to access, yields higher predictive performance, and provides stronger stability. Thus, band can replace LU and LUC to a certain extent and provide support for automatic and real-time landslide monitoring.

Landslides are geological disasters affected by a variety of factors that have the characteristics of a strong destructive nature and rapid development and cause major harm to the safety of people’s lives and property within the scope of the disaster. Excessive landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) factors can reduce the accuracy of LSM results and are not conducive to researchers finding the key LSM factors. In this study, with the Three Gorges Reservoir area to the Padang section as an example, the frequency ratio (FR), index of entropy (IOE), Relief-F algorithm, and weights-of-evidence (WOE) Bayesian model were used to sort and screen the importance of 20 LSM factors; then, the LSMs generated based on different factor sets modeled are evaluated and further scored. The results showed that the IOE screening factor was better than the FR, Relief-F, and WOE Bayesian models in the case of retaining no fewer than eight factors; the score for 20 factors without screening was 45 points, and the score for 12 factors screened based on the IOE was 44.8 points, indicating that there was an optimal retention number that had little effect on the LSM results when IOE screening was used. The core factor set obtained by the method for comparing the increase in scores and the increase in corresponding factors effectively improved the accuracy of the LSM results, thus verifying the effectiveness of the proposed method for ranking the importance of LSM factors. The method proposed in this study can effectively screen the key LSM factors and improve the accuracy and scientific soundness of LSM results.

The mining industry production is an important pillar industry in China, while its extensive production activities have led to several ecological and environmental problems. Earth observation technology using high-resolution satellite imagery can help us efficiently obtain information on surface elements, surveying and monitoring various land occupation issues arising from open-pit mining production activities. Conventional pixel-based interpretation methods for high-resolution remote sensing images are restricted by “salt and pepper” noise caused by environmental factors, making it difficult to meet increasing requirements for monitoring accuracy. With the Jingxiang phosphorus mining area in Jingmen Hubei Province as the studied area, this paper uses a multi-scale segmentation algorithm to extract large-scale main characteristic information using a layered mask method based on the hierarchical structure of the image object. The remaining characteristic elements were classified and extracted in combination with the random forest model and characteristic factors to obtain land occupation information related mining industry production, which was compared with the results of the Classification and Regression Tree model. 23 characteristic factors in three aspects were selected, including spectral, geometric and texture characteristics. The methods employed in this study achieved 86% and 0.78 respectively in overall extraction accuracy analysis and the Kappa coefficient analysis, compared to 79% and 0.68 using the conventional method.

This study introduces four rock–soil characteristics factors, that is, Lithology, Rock Structure, Rock Infiltration, and Rock Weathering, which based on the properties of rock formations, to predict Landslide Susceptibility Mapping (LSM) in Three Gorges Reservoir Area from Zigui to Badong. Logistic regression, artificial neural network, support vector machine is used in LSM modeling. The study consists of three main steps. In the first step, these four factors are combined with the 11 basic factors to form different factor combinations. The second step randomly selects training (70% of the total) and validation (30%) datasets out of grid cells corresponding to landslide and non-landslide locations in the study area. The final step constructs the LSM models to obtain different landslide susceptibility index maps and landslide susceptibility zoning maps. The specific category precision, receiver operating characteristic curve, and 5 other statistical evaluation methods are used for quantitative evaluations. The evaluation results show that, in most cases, the result based on Rock Structure are better than the result obtained by traditional method based on Lithology, have the best performance. To further study the influence of rock–soil characteristic factors on the LSM, these four factors are divided into “Intrinsic attribute factors” and “External participation factors” in accordance with the participation of external factors, to generate the LSMs. The evaluation results show that the result based on Intrinsic attribute factors are better than the result based on External participation factors, indicating the significance of Intrinsic attribute factors in LSM. The method proposed in this study can effectively improve the scientificity, accuracy, and validity of LSM.