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Landslide predictive performance is expected to vary with different sampling techniques, such as landslide random and cluster sampling. Current advancements in remote sensing technologies and machine learning (ML) have enhanced landslide prediction performance. The Himalayan Mountain range in Pakistan poses an unadorned threat to the ecosystem and valley population because of landslide occurrence. The present study explores, and tests alternative sampling technique based on spatial pattern characterization in the wake of increased landslide prediction efficacy, rather than a renowned random technique for training and testing sampling. Thereupon, landslide inventory data with 17 geo-environmental factors (i.e. topographic, hydrological and seismic factors) were determined. Landslide cluster patterns were confirmed by the Nearest Neighbor Index (NNI) method and after getting the cluster patterns, the predicted performance of landslide sampling was tested using ML and statistical methods. Advanced ML algorithms including Random Forest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Naive Bayes (NB), K-nearest Neighbors (KNN) and statistical methods including Weight-ofEvidence (WofE) and Logistic Regression (LR) were used and validated. The landslide-prone district of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (Neelum Valley), Kashmir Himalayas, Pakistan, was selected as a case study. Prediction performance rates are high with area under the curve (AUC) ranging from 0.802 to 0.912; accuracy (ACC) ranges from 0.78 to 0.89, and kappa ranges from 0.50 to 0.68 with cluster sampling technique, whereas the performance was low with random sampling technique, with AUC ranges from 0.768 to 0.895; ACC ranges from 0.74 to 0.86 and kappa ranges from 0.48 to 0.64. The descending order of accuracy of the six algorithms was XGboost, RF, KNN, NB, LR and WofE. Our results confirmed that the landslides followed cluster patterns in the study area, and ML algorithms with cluster training samples positively affected landslide susceptibility prediction with a statistically significant difference. The outcomes support the hypothesis that using landslides spatial natural existence, as training samples instead of random concepts, improves the prediction ability; and highlights that alternative landslide partitioning technique could be a practicable and robust choice for landslides prediction modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine learning methods are considered as most effective approaches to accomplish landslide susceptibility analysis around the globe. Landslide susceptibility maps (LSMs) have been frequently executed by statistical models in NW Himalaya. However, the comparison and applications of the statistical models with modern machine learning techniques has not been fully explored in this region. Hence, this study aims to compare the predicted performance of statistical and popular machine learning models to explore robust landslide prediction model in the landslide-prone area of NW Himalaya and investigate the compensations and limitations of these models to grasp a more precise and consistent result. This study presented machine learning approaches based on the artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM) and logistic regression (LR) and the statistical methods based on the frequency ratio (FR), information value (InfoV) and weight of evidence (WoE). For this purpose, first an inventory map of 1507 landslides was prepared and randomly divided into training (70%) and testing (30%) dataset. Furthermore, 12 landslide conditioning factors (LCFs) were extracted from geospatial dataset to prepare thematic layers in ArcGIS. Thereafter, factor analysis was performed to eliminate colinear and least important variables which can mislead the results. The results showed that all selected LCFs are noncolinear and have significant contribution on landslides initiation, however, lithology, slope angle, annual rainfall and landuse were most influential factors. For modeling purpose, landslide inventory was correlated against all LCFs and trained into six models to produce respective LSMs. Finally, the performance of produced LSM models was validated and compared through area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), Accuracy, Recall, F1-score and Cohen's Kappa coefficients to assess the robustness of employed models. The results exhibit that the performance scores of machine learning models were considerably superior than statistical models. While, the AUROC values based on validation dataset indicate that LR (0.89) has better prediction ability followed by SVM (0.86), ANN (0.84), FR (0.83), InfoV (0.82) and WoE (0.81) in this study. Therefore, it is reasoned out that the machine learning methods are more reliable in generating adequate LSMs. However, the LR is recommended as most efficient model for predicting landslide susceptible zones in study region and thus can be considered as robust model for landslide susceptibility assessment in similar geo-environmental regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]