TY - JOUR PY - 2020// TI - Mass wasting susceptibility assessment of snow avalanches using machine learning models JO - Scientific reports A1 - Choubin, Bahram A1 - Borji, Moslem A1 - Hosseini, Farzaneh Sajedi A1 - Mosavi, Amirhosein A1 - Dineva, Adrienn A. SP - e18363 EP - e18363 VL - 10 IS - 1 N2 - Snow avalanche is among the most harmful natural hazards with major socioeconomic and environmental destruction in the cold and mountainous regions. The devastating propagation and accumulation of the snow avalanche debris and mass wasting of surface rocks and vegetation particles threaten human life, transportation networks, built environments, ecosystems, and water resources. Susceptibility assessment of snow avalanche hazardous areas is of utmost importance for mitigation and development of land-use policies. This research evaluates the performance of the well-known machine learning methods, i.e., generalized additive model (GAM), multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS), boosted regression trees (BRT), and support vector machine (SVM), in modeling the mass wasting hazard induced by snow avalanches. The key features are identified by the recursive feature elimination (RFE) method and used for the model calibration. The results indicated a good performance of the modeling process (Accuracy > 0.88, Kappa > 0.76, Precision > 0.84, Recall > 0.86, and AUC > 0.89), which the SVM model highlighted superior performance than others. Sensitivity analysis demonstrated that the topographic position index (TPI) and distance to stream (DTS) were the most important variables which had more contribution in producing the susceptibility maps.

Language: en

LA - en SN - 2045-2322 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-75476-w ID - ref1 ER -