Rainfall-induced landslide susceptibility assessment using random forest weight at basin scale

Rainfall-induced landslides are one of the most common geological hazards, occurring over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales in mountainous landscapes (McKean & Roering 2001). Despite considerable efforts of hazard prevention and risk management, landslides continue to present an acute threat to life and property. It has been estimated that the worldwide damage of landslides that have occurred since the 20th century, have resulted in more than 62,000 deaths and a loss of at least US$9.7 billion (EM-DAT 2016). Effective measures to prevent landslides are urgently required to reduce loss of life, property, and infrastructure.

Landslide susceptibility assessment is one of the important steps for landslide risk analysis and has been widely applied to a variety of spatial scales due to its convenient application and compatibility with the geographical information systems (GIS) (Balteanu et al. 2010; Christian et al. 2015). The assessment requires evaluation of the possibility of a landslide occurring in certain areas based on multiple indexes such as precipitation, topography, morphology, lithology, and land-use type. Since landslide susceptibility assessment is a synthesis and involves several variables, multiplicity, complexity, uncertainty, and inaccuracy inevitably exists during the process, which is a worldwide multivariable evaluation problem (Jiang & Eastman 2000; Pistocchi et al. 2002; Lee & Evangelista 2006; Lee & Pradhan 2007; Su et al. 2015). Fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) is a fuzzy mathematics method that is convenient for expressing and processing random, fuzzy, insufficient, or inexact data and other distribution information (Giachetti & Young 1997a, 1997b), and has previously been applied to landslide susceptibility assessment (Yang et al. 2016). However, determining a reasonable index weight for FCE requires extensive research because differences in weighting may cause considerable differences in the results. Three main types of weightings are frequently used in assessment systems in general: the subjective weight (SW), the objective weight (OW), and the combination weight (CW), which combines both SW and OW. SW and OW are determined by the intentions of the decision-maker and are strongly affected by expert knowledge and biases, resulting in high subjectivity (Jiang et al. 2009; Zou et al. 2013). A suitable index weight should objectively reflect the index importance and should not be influenced by the intentions of the decision-maker. For these purposes, OW is more suitable than the SW and CW. However, shortcomings exist in the commonly used OW methods, e.g., entropy theory (Li et al. 2012; Jesmin & Sharif 2014; Yan et al. 2014), the criteria importance though inter-criteria correlation (CRITIC) method (Diakoulaki et al. 1995; Li & Mo 2015), the gray relational analysis (GRA) method (Chang et al. 2003; Jia et al. 2015), or the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method (Opricovic & Tzeng 2004; Behzadian et al. 2012). The shortcomings of these methods include dependence on a significant amount of sample data, poor relevance, and complicated calculations, and can potentially lead to an unreasonable index weight. Therefore, new methods of OW are required to address the aforementioned problems.

Random forests (RFs) are one of the machine-learning algorithms and provide estimates regarding the importance of variables in classification (Breiman 2001). Significant theoretical and empirical studies in other fields, such as genomic ranking (Chen & Ishwaran 2012), neuroscience prediction (Smith et al. 2013), T-cell epitope classification (Huang et al. 2013), soil parent material mapping (Heung et al. 2014), vegetable oil analysis (Ai et al. 2014), and flood hazard risk assessment (Wang et al. 2015), have shown that RF may perform classification work effectively and quantitatively and will provide objective estimates of the important variables for classification. The quantitative estimate of variable importance is consistent with the idea of variable (index) weights, which implies that OW could, in theory, be computed via the importance of the variables. However, no study so far has focused on determining OW, utilizing RF in the field of landslide susceptibility assessment. This knowledge gap constituted the motivation for this study.

Taking the Dongjiang River basin as a study case, the main objectives of this study were: (1) to demonstrate that RF is able to calculate a reasonable OW for landslide susceptibility assessment; and (2) to construct a landslide susceptibility assessment model of basin scale, using FCE based on random forest weight (RFW). This study presents a novel methodology for the calculation of OW, and provides additional scientific references for landslide hazard analysis and risk management in the study basin.

Dealing with the relationship between multiple indexes and susceptibility levels is a difficult aspect of susceptibility assessment as it involves the problems of multi-index and multi-level fuzzy synthetic evaluation (Jiang et al. 2009; Zhao et al. 2012; Lai et al. 2015). FCE is one of the fuzzy mathematics methods which is widely used for risk evaluation due to its ability of expressing and processing multi-variable and multi-level data or information (Giachetti & Young 1997a, 1997b; Feng & Luo 2009; Li 2013). Therefore, FCE was chosen to construct a landslide susceptibility assessment model.

In a RF, multiple samples are drawn using the resampling bootstrap method, and classification and regression trees (CART) are built corresponding to each bootstrap sample (Breiman 2001). RF uses CARTs to classify data and to measure variable importance and the general operating principle, as shown in Figure 1. One of the advantages of RF is that it provides information on the statistical importance of each single variable within the overall result. This function helps the decision-maker to appreciate the contribution an index adds to the total risk. In the forest, approximately one-third of the data instances are not used to grow a tree, and these instances are termed the out-of-bag (OOB) data and can be used to estimate error (Yeh et al. 2014; Li et al. 2016). The OOB error rate can be obtained by the following steps (Breiman 2001). First, each case that was left out in the construction of the k^th tree is put down the k^th tree to get a classification; in this way, a test set classification can be obtained for each case for about one-third of the trees. Second, at the end of the run, j is the class that got most of the votes every time case n was OOB. Finally, the proportion of times when j is not equal to the true class of n averaged over all cases is the OOB error rate.

where and are the ith variable weight and the MGD value, respectively. The RFW equation is therefore based on MGD without involving subjective factors. The RFW equation measures the importance of variables and is available to provide reasonable weights for the FCE.

As a commonly used method of OW, EW is compared with RFW in this study. As a measure of disorder, the concept of entropy originates in thermodynamics and measures the heat energy that fails to generate work (Li et al. 2012). Entropy was first applied to information theory by Shannon (1948) and became the method of measurement of order in a system. EW is based on the information entropy theory and reflects the useful information content, offered by each variable (Jesmin & Sharif 2014; Yan et al. 2014; Lai et al. 2015).

The Dongjiang River basin, located in south China, has a drainage area of approximately 27,000 km², accounting for approximately 5.96% of the Pearl River basin (Figure 2). Six cities, Ganzhou, Heyuan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, are located in the basin. The basin comprises rolling country with low-relief surfaces in the downstream and mainly mountainous regions in the middle and upper reaches. Frontal and typhoon-type rainfall are predominant and annual rainfall ranges from 1,500 mm to 2,400 mm (Liu et al. 2010). Latosolic red soil, krasnozem, and paddy soil are the main soil types found in the basin and become soft when infiltrated by rain. The Paleozoic erathem, mainly consisting of feldspathic quartz sandstone, siltstone, schist, and shale, is well developed in the upstream of the basin, while the mid- and downstream is covered by mesozoic erathem (68.68%) mainly consisting of conglomerate and sandshale. A large number of small faults are distributed mainly in the middle and upper reaches and most of them are fractures within the bedrock, which may cause potential geological instability in the area. The basin is an economically advanced area with a dense population and valuable property. Therefore, once natural disasters occur, significant economic, ecological, and social losses can be expected in the basin (Liu & Li 2008; Wang et al. 2015).

The Dongjiang River basin is in a high-occurrence landslide disaster zone due to the high volume of precipitation, the soft soil, and adverse terrain (Lai et al. 2016a, 2016b). Examples of occurrences in the area include: a severe landslide in Zijin County as a result of continuously heavy rain in June 2007, causing two deaths; six people of Daba Town of Heping County were buried by a rainstorm-triggered landslide in May 2014; a landslide in Heping County caused by continuous heavy rain killed three villagers and injured two children in March 2016. According to incomplete statistics, thousands of landslides induced by rainfall and artificial action were reported during 2000–2010 and landslide-debris flows caused casualties and severe economic losses. For this reason, a systematic landslide susceptibility assessment of the basin is vital. The Dongjiang River basin provides a typical case for the exploration of the topic of this study.

Index selection varies among study areas according to the specific characteristics of each location. One index can have significant impacts on landslide susceptibility in a specific area, but may have a limited influence in another area. In the landslide susceptibility assessment of this study, the proposed factors of rainfall, topography, geology, and ecology were considered (Miller et al. 2009; Pradhan 2011; Avtar et al. 2011; Jimenez-Peralvarez et al. 2011; Roodposhti et al. 2014; Lei et al. 2014; Su et al. 2015). Additionally, historical landslide events indicated that most of the landslides that had occurred in the study basin were induced by extreme rainfall, and consequently, eight indexes were finally selected to quantitatively represent regional characteristics. The eight indexes are as follows:

• Maximum 1-day precipitation (M1DP, mm): rainfall has a major influence as a landslide ‘trigger’ (Miller et al. 2009). M1DP was selected among the maximum 6 h, 12 h, 1-day, and 3-day precipitations, considering historical rainstorms that cause landslides in the basin. Thirty-four rainfall stations in the basin were used to calculate this index.

• Elevation (EL, m): the elevation of a geographic location denotes its height above or below a fixed reference point. As one of several important topographic parameters, this index was selected to measure the relative elevation of the basin. The database of EL is extracted from the digital elevation model (DEM) with a resolution of 30 m.

• Slope angle (SL, degree): similar to elevation, SL is also one of the key topographic parameters. SL is frequently applied as an index, reflecting the degree of topographic change in landslide susceptibility studies since landslides are directly related to SL. A large SL provides a large potential energy to cause earth-body sliding.

• Distance to fault (DF, m): this index is based on geological conditions. Areas near faults potentially suffer from geological instability, i.e., the closer to the faults, the more dangerous it will be.

• Soil erodibility factor (SEF): this factor provides a quantitative description of the inherent erodibility of a particular soil; it is a measure of susceptibility of soil particles to detachment and transport by rainfall and runoff. Therefore, the SEF index is based on surface soil conditions and reflects the ease with which soil can be eroded. The SEF was calculated via the erosion-productivity impact calculator (EPIC) model (Williams et al. 1990). A large SEF value denotes soil that is much more susceptible to erosion.

• Shear resistance capacity (SRC, MPa): this factor characterizes the capability of rock resistance to shear. Therefore, this index is also based on geological conditions and reflects the lithological character. A large SRC value shows that this type of lithology is able to withstand a considerable collapsing force.

• Runoff coefficient (RC): this index reflects the macro influence of human activity. It is based on the land-cover type of corresponding RC values (Table 1, Lai et al. 2016a, 2016b). A large RC value means that more rainwater is converted into surface runoff and less water can infiltrate the underground, thus greatly reducing the probability of breaking the soil structure.

• Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI): this index represents vegetation cover. A large NDVI value means that the area has dense vegetation, providing a well-developed root system that can both maintain and stabilize soils. Areas with high vegetation cover are generally safer than bare areas.

The spatial distribution of each index is shown in Figure 3. Among the eight indexes, positive indexes (variables) include M1DP, EL, SL, and SEF. The SRC, DF, RC, and NDVI are the negative indexes (variables).

Data sources: Precipitation data (1960–2010) were accessed from the Hydrology Bureau of the Guangdong Province (http://www.gdsw.gov.cn/wcm/gdsw/index.html). DEM (SRTM30) was available from the CGIAR-CSI SRTM 30-m Database, which had been corrected by SRTM 90-m and local elevation data. SL data were extracted according to DEM. Soil-type data were obtained from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (http://www.fao.org/home/en/). Land-cover type data (2010) were provided by the Resources and Environment Science Data Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (http://www.resdc.cn/Default.aspx). Lithology and fault data (1:250,000) were available from the National Geological Archives of China (http://www.ngac.org.cn). NDVI (30 m) was provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (http://www.nasa.gov/). All of these indexes were converted into a grid format with a cell size of 30 m × 30 m, using the GIS technique. Data-processing tools, such as the R-project, Arc.GIS 9.3, and MS Excel were used.

This study aims to construct a landslide susceptibility assessment model, utilizing FCE based on RFW. According to the assessment flow chart (Figure 4), a proper training and validation dataset had to be created prior to computing RFW. A database of historical landslide sites was created during the study via field survey, air photo/satellite image interpretation, and literature and news research. Generally, only rainfall-induced landslides that occurred after extreme rainfalls were considered; landslides caused by artificial actions, including slope excavation, mine excavation, and reservoir construction were not taken into account in this study. Data for a total of 208 landslide sites were collected during this study. From these 208 landslide sites, a random sample of two-thirds (139) was used to create a training dataset, and the remaining sites (69) were used as data for validation. In other words, the remaining 69 sites were used to validate the final assessment effect, i.e., the more landslides located in high and very susceptibility level zones, the better the assessment effect will be. This study used the classification function of RF, which required at least two categories to perform the calculation (Breiman 2001). The 139 sites were classified as the first category and identified as ‘1′. An equal sample size to the first category (139 non-landslide sites) were randomly and uniformly drawn as the second category and identified as ‘0′. According to Equation (9), the eight indexes were then normalized to eight raster layers, using GIS techniques. Thereafter, samples from 278 sites (including 139 landslides sites and 139 non-landslide sites) were created by extracting the normalized values of the eight layers via the ‘Sample’ tool coupled in Arc.GIS 9.3. These 278 samples, including eight normalized values with a category value (‘0′ or ‘1′), constituted a complete training dataset (Figure 5). The dataset was then included into the RF package of the R-project to train and construct the model. The common model-checking algorithm of cross-validation was used to estimate the accuracy and to reduce effects of calculation occasionality (Heung et al. 2014; Lai et al. 2016a, 2016b).

A grading standard had to be set prior to performing the FCE method. However, there is currently no unified standard for index grading, implying that the standard is determined according to the specific and actual situation of the studied basin. As shown in Table 2, critical values of the grading standard corresponding to five levels were obtained via the quantile method, a typical method for classification of GIS technique where each class contains an equal number of features. Membership degrees were calculated according to Equations (2)–(4), using the critical values of the grading standard. Then, the data of eight index layers, RFW, and membership degrees were entered into the FCE method according to Equation (5). Finally, the landslide susceptibility map was generated based on GIS techniques.

The number of classification trees k and the number of variables that have been tried at each split m were the two main parameters with significant impact on error rate. Liaw & Wiener (2002) recommended that m = sqrt (M) and thus, m should be set to 3 in this study. Therefore, only the sensitivity of the parameter k was tested. The OOB error rate, a common coefficient of measuring RF's testing performance, was utilized in the sensitivity analysis. The OOB error rate varies strongly in different fields and study cases (Zhang et al. 2008; Ok et al. 2012; Huang et al. 2013; Heung et al. 2014), and a low value means superior performance and general effectivity. Five-fold cross-validation, including the training and testing process, were applied to reduce accidental error. The 278 samples in the cross-validation had classification tree settings ranging from 10 to 20,000, respectively. Five series of training and testing OOB error rates were calculated after cross-validation. Figure 6 shows average OOB error rates of both training and testing, based on the five series of error rates.

Figure 6 indicates that the training error rate decreased from 21.62% to 16.07% with a classification trees setting ranging from 10 to 20,000, but leveled off at over 200 trees. Similar to the training error rate, the testing error rate decreased from 18.55% to 13.82%, but leveled off at approximately 50 trees. Both training and testing error rates decreased with increasing number of classification trees, suggesting that both error rates can be reduced, to a certain extent, by increasing the number of classification trees. However, limitless increase of trees does not significantly contribute to increasing accuracy.

Table 3 shows the OOB error rate of a five-fold cross-validation with 3,500 classification trees. The error rate of training ranges from 14.29% to 17.41% with an average value of 16.16%, and the range of testing was 9.09%–18.18% with an average rate of 13.82%. Both these error rates are considered acceptable since each fold error rate is below 20%, providing reliability and rationality for the next step. Therefore, the number of classification trees was finally set to 3,500 for this study, considering accuracy and operation time.

Five series of MGD were generated by the five-fold cross-validation. Thereafter, RFW was calculated via average MGD based on Equation (7). As shown in Figure 6 and Table 4, the EL and SL, representing topography conditions, were the top two most important of the eight indexes, occupying 46.31% of the total average MGD. NDVI was regarded as the third most important index, with a percentage of 14.07%. M1DP, DF, and RC ranked fourth, fifth, and sixth with percentages of 11.56%, 10.46%, and 6.40%, respectively. However, the indexes SEF and SRC were less consequential, with an average MGD of only 11.2% of the total.

According to Figure 3(b), many mountains are located in the upstream and eastern part of the basin. A mountain provides a sufficient sliding earth body for a landslide event and greatly increases the probability of a landslide event to occur. Figure 5 shows that most landslide sites are located in mountainous regions, confirming that the high impact index EL identified by RF plays a vital role in causing a landslide. Similar to EL, SL is considered as the second most important index by RF. A large SL provides significant potential energy to cause earth body sliding. Figure 3(c) shows that most landslide sites are located in areas with a large SL, verifying that SL also plays a significant role in landslide development. NDVI ranks third and has a similar spatial distribution as EL and SL. The remaining indexes (i.e., M1DP, DF, RC, SEF, and SRC) play relatively insignificant roles since the landslide site locations have no clear regularity correlated with the spatial distribution of these indexes. Additionally, the Dongjiang River basin has dense vegetation cover with a well-developed root system, where the vegetation and root system could greatly conserve soil and decrease top-soil erosion. In this case, the NDVI greatly offsets the impact of SEF and consequently has a larger weight than the SEF, which means that the NDVI has a larger contribution to the landslide susceptibility level than the SEF, but does not mean that the SEF is unimportant for the formation of a landslide.

The EW was calculated for comparison in this study. With normalized values of the eight indexes, the 139 sites that classified as first category and identified as ‘1′ were applied to calculating the EW; however, the 139 non-landslide sites that were classified as second category and identified as ‘0′ did not add to the calculation and, consequently, the entropy method failed to differentiate the two sample categories (i.e., ‘1′ and ‘0′). Table 4 indicates that the index weights of the two methods differ considerably. For example, the entropy method considers RC as the most vital index, while the RFW regards EL as the most important index. The SEF's EW is only 0.0049, which implies that the effects of soil type on the landslide should be negligible. However, the SEF reached 0.0571 in RFW despite ranking second from last. The other indexes, such as M1DP, DF, RC, and NDVI, also exhibited considerable differences. The main cause for the difference between both methods may be that the RFW is based on historical landslide sites that can provide effective and accurate information on landslide attributes and location. The RF is a machine-learning algorithm with strong data mining ability that is able to mine the internal laws between the indexes and the susceptibility categories that include the historical landslide information; then, the RFW is generated using MGD based on these internal laws. However, the EW is only determined by one category (mark ‘1′) without considering available information on non-landslide sites (mark ‘0′), thus fails to reflect the relationship between multiple indexes and susceptibility levels.

The RFW, shown in Figure 7, was used as the final weight. The landslide susceptibility was calculated via Equation (5) and Figure 8(a) shows the landslide susceptibility map of the Dongjiang River basin based on RFW. The zones that featured very high and high susceptibility levels are mainly located in the western and southern parts of the basin, which are mainly mountainous areas. The very low and low susceptibility level zones are distributed in the central and upstream areas of the basin and are predominantly flat. Medium susceptibility level zones are mainly located in the transition areas between high and low susceptibility level zones. From very low to very high, the zone proportions of each susceptibility level were 18.93%, 20.96%, 20.30%, 20.08%, and 19.73%, respectively. The dangerous zones, including very high and high susceptibility level zones, occupy approximately 39.89%, indicating that the landslide susceptibility situation in the Dongjiang River basin is quite significant.

To evaluate the landslide susceptibility results, other data were used to validate the reliability of high and very high susceptibility level zones. A total of 69 samples mentioned in the section ‘Landslide dataset used in the analysis’ (approximately one-third of the 208 landslide sites) were utilized to validate the reliability of this result. Figure 8(a) shows the verification sites randomly distributed across the basin, implying the rationality of these sites. Only the validation landslide sites located exactly in dangerous zones (high and very high susceptibility level zones) were selected to achieve estimating accuracy, meaning that the more sites in the dangerous zones, the higher the accuracy. Table 5 shows that the numbers of sites located in very high and high susceptibility level zones were 11 and 44, respectively, with a total of 55 sites located in dangerous zones. However, the numbers of landslide sites in medium, low, and very low susceptibility level zones were only 7, 2, and 5, respectively, occupying 20.29% of the total.

A landslide susceptibility map based on EW (Table 4) was also created for comparison. Figure 8(b) shows that very high susceptibility level zones are mainly located in the western and southeastern parts of the basin. Most of these areas clearly belong to mountainous areas. High susceptibility level zones include Longgang, Xinfeng, east Huizhou, and central Dongyuan. The low and very low susceptibility level zones were mainly located in the central parts of the upstream. The EW medium susceptibility level zones were similar to those of RFW and were mainly located in the transition areas between the high and low susceptibility level zones. The spatial distribution between the landslide susceptibility maps varied considerably. This variation clearly results from large differences in the index weights. The 69 landslide sites were also utilized to validate the accuracy of EW. Table 5 shows a total of 44 sites that lie within dangerous zones with a percentage of approximately 63.77%, which is lower than the result for RFW.

Figure 8 indicates that 14 sites (20.29%) that were located in the non-hazardous areas may partly be explained by data errors existing in the assessment system, including the indexes data error and validation data error. For example, the NDVI and RC were interpreted and generated based on remote-sensing imagery; however, considerable uncertainty and subjectivity exist in the process, thus significantly decreasing index precision (Liu et al. 2008). Moreover, the locations of historical landslide events used in this analysis were not always exact because information of accurate locations of a few landslides was incomplete and uncertain, which may also decrease the validation precision. Nevertheless, the percentage of sites located in the dangerous zones reached 79.71%, which is a satisfactory accuracy for a landslide susceptibility assessment in general.

Figure 7 reveals that RF ranks EL and SL as the two most important indexes, while SEF and SRC are ranked the least important. Three steps were performed to provide further clarity on the rationality of RFW. The steps were as follows: (1) removing the two most important and the least important indexes, so that only six indexes remained; (2) determining the index weight again according to the proportion of MGD value shown in Figure 7; and (3) generating landslide susceptibility maps. Figure 9(a) and 9(b) show the landslide susceptibility maps that removed the least important indexes (SEF and SRC) and the most important indexes (EL and SL), respectively. Comparing Figure 8(a) and Figure 9(a) shows that some areas with medium susceptibility level are found in downstream areas. Nevertheless, there is a basic similarity in the distribution of dangerous zones in both maps. Moreover, the low and very low susceptibility level zones also display similar distribution patterns. Table 5 indicates that the accuracy reached 76.81% despite removing SEF and SRC, with a reduction of only 2.90%, suggesting that these two indexes are dispensable for the assessment system. However, the dangerous zones in Figure 9(b) differ greatly from those of Figure 8(a) since the most important indexes (EL and SL) have been removed. The result with the very high and high susceptibility level in the midstream areas, such as Heyuan, Boluo, Longmen, central Zijin, and central Huidong, is obviously inaccurate since most of these zones belong to plain areas. The accuracy in Figure 9(b) is merely 30.43%, which is far lower than that of Figure 8(a), suggesting that the EL and SL are indispensable and play a significant role in the assessment system. The RFW proposed by this study can be regarded as reasonable and feasible, and evidence has been provided and substantiated via precision validation and contrastive analysis. Additionally, the RFW also provides a clue for using high-resolution data, for example, RF ranking EL as the most important indexes means that the errors in EL might strongly affect the assessment results. In this case, the EL layer requires high-resolution data to obtain more accurate results (e.g., this research used the modified SRTM 30-m data instead of the SRTM 90-m data).

RF is an efficient and easy to operate learning machine and was used in this study to determine index weights. This is a novel approach for landslide susceptibility assessments. However, certain issues still remain. For example, the landslide susceptibility and index weights were assessed by the statistic method; however, they were not strongly involved in the formation mechanism, which may lead to difficulties to reflect the physical process of landslide. As far as the evaluation system is concerned, rainfall-induced landslide susceptibility was considered at basin scale and only eight indexes were selected to construct the index system. This neglects the influence of seismic factors, river degradation, and groundwater movement due to data restrictions. However, these factors also play an important role in the formation and development of landslides. A more comprehensive index system needs to be developed in future studies to account for these as well as for other missing factors. Also, the RFW of this study requires a large number of historical landslide sites. Increasing the number of sites would significantly improve the accuracy of the results. Merely 208 sites were used in this study due to data limitations. This study proved that, despite a few drawbacks, the application of RF to weight determination shows significant potential. Thus, RFW is highly recommended for landslide susceptibility assessments.

Landslide susceptibility assessment is an appropriate tool for analyzing and predicting the spatial distribution of rainfall-induced landslides. However, the determination of suitable index weights is a critical step that significantly influences the assessment results. To solve this problem, this study proposed a new weight determining method based on RF. Using the Dongjiang River basin for a case study, eight indexes were selected to construct a susceptibility index system. Using OW computed via RF, the landslide susceptibility was evaluated by the FCE method. The study concludes that:

1. RF ranks EL and SL as the two most important of the eight indexes, occupying 46.31% of the total MGD. NDVI was regarded as the third most important index, with a percentage of 14.07%. M1DP, DF, and RC ranked fourth, fifth, and sixth with percentages of 11.56%, 10.46%, and 6.40%, respectively. The indexes SEF and SRC are less consequential, with an MGD of only 11.2% of the total.

2. The accuracy based on RFW reached up to 76.81%, while it only reached 66.67% based on EW. Both the precision validation and contrastive analysis demonstrated that the assessment results of RFW were more reasonable and satisfactory than those of EW. Generally, the landslide susceptibility situation in the Dongjiang River basin was quite significant. Therefore, preventative actions, including both engineering and non-engineering measures, should be conducted in the dangerous zones to predict and prevent landslides, and to reduce losses of capital and human life as much as possible.

3. Two experiments removed the two most important and the least important indexes, respectively, providing further evidence that the index weight calculated via RF was reasonable and feasible for landslide susceptibility assessment. The initial application of the RF to weight determination in this study showed significant potential despite a number of drawbacks. Accordingly, the index weight calculated via RF was more consistent with scientific principles and can therefore be recommended for use in this field.

The research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 91547202, 51479216, 51579105, 51210013), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2017M612662), the Chinese Academy of Engineering Consulting Project (2015-ZD-07-04-03), the Public Welfare Project of Ministry of Water Resources (Grant No. 200901043-03), the Project for Creative Research from Guangdong Water Resources Department (Grant No. 2016-07, 2016-01), and Research program of Guangzhou Water Authority (2017).