Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society ISSN:1229-2427(Print) 2288-646X(Online) 한국지반공학회 논문집

Proactive assessment of landslide susceptibility is necessary for minimizing casualties. This study proposes a methodology for classifying the landslide safety factor using a classification algorithm based on machine learning techniques. The high-risk area model is adopted to perform the classification and eight geotechnical parameters are adopted as inputs. Four classification algorithms—namely decision tree, k-nearest neighbor, logistic regression, and random forest—are employed for comparing classification accuracy for the safety factors ranging between 1.2 and 2.0. Notably, a high accuracy is demonstrated in the safety factor range of 1.2~1.7, but a relatively low accuracy is obtained in the range of 1.8~2.0. To overcome this issue, the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) is adopted to generate additional data. The application of SMOTE improves the average accuracy by ~250% in the safety factor range of 1.8~2.0. The results demonstrate that SMOTE algorithm improves the accuracy of classification algorithms when applied to geotechnical data.