Landslide susceptibility mapping at Zonouz Plain, Iran using genetic programming and comparison with frequency ratio, logistic regression, and artificial neural network models

Without a doubt, landslide is one of the most disastrous natural hazards and landslide susceptibility maps (LSMs) in regional scale are the useful guide to future development planning. Therefore, the importance of generating LSMs through different methods is popular in the international literature. The goal of this study was to evaluate the susceptibility of the occurrence of landslides in Zonouz Plain, located in North-West of Iran. For this purpose, a landslide inventory map was constructed using field survey, air photo/satellite image interpretation, and literature search for historical landslide records. Then, seven landslide-conditioning factors such as lithology, slope, aspect, elevation, land cover, distance to stream, and distance to road were utilized for generation LSMs by various models: frequency ratio (FR), logistic regression (LR), artificial neural network (ANN), and genetic programming (GP) methods in geographic information system (GIS). Finally, total four LSMs were obtained by using these four methods. For verification, the results of LSM analyses were confirmed using the landslide inventory map containing 190 active landslide zones. The validation process showed that the prediction accuracy of LSMs, produced by the FR, LR, ANN, and GP, was 87.57, 89.42, 92.37, and 93.27 %, respectively. The obtained results indicated that the use of GP for generating LSMs provides more accurate prediction in comparison with FR, LR, and ANN. Furthermore; GP model is superior to the ANN model because it can present an explicit formulation instead of weights and biases matrices.