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Comparison on landslide nonlinear displacement analysis and prediction with

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DOI: 10.1007/s10346-013-0443-z

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 Original Paper
Landslides Zaobao Liu I Jianfu Shao I Weiya Xu I Hongjie Chen I Chong Shi
DOI 10.1007/s10346-013-0443-z
Received: 11 February 2013
Accepted: 8 October 2013 Comparison on landslide nonlinear displacement
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
analysis and prediction with computational intelligence
approaches
Abstract Landslide displacement is widely obtained to discover
landslide behaviors for purpose of event forecasting. This article
aims to present a comparative study on landslide nonlinear
displacement analysis and prediction using computational
intelligence techniques. Three state-of-art techniques, the support
vector machine (SVM), the relevance vector machine (RVM), and
the Gaussian process (GP), are comparatively presented briefly for
modeling landslide displacement series. The three techniques are
discussed comparatively for both fitting and predicting the
landslide displacement series. Two landslides, the Baishuihe
colluvial landslide in China Three Georges and the Super-Sauze
mudslide in the French Alps, are illustrated. The results prove that
the computational intelligence approaches are feasible and capable
of fitting and predicting landslide nonlinear displacement. The
Gaussian process, on the whole, performs better than the support
vector machine, relevance vector machine, and simple artificial
neural network (ANN) with optimized parameter values in
predictive analysis of the landslide displacement.
Keywords Landslide . Displacement prediction . Nonlinear .
Computational intelligence . Relevance vector machine . Gaussian
process
Introduction
Landslide displacement is the typical signature of its underlying
complex evolution process. Landslide displacement analysis
(LDA) is a critical issue of an early warning system and can
contribute to prevent suffering property damage and loss of
human lives. It provides a potential physically based approach
for landslide prediction. Landslide behavior is generally
monitored by various instruments, such as extensometers,
inclinometers, and clinometers. The most reliable parameter
obtained by these instruments is the landslide displacement.
Hence, LDA is widely used in landslide forecasting, especially in
the short-term forecasting of landslides with creep displacement.
Slope or landslide displacement analysis and prediction are
valuable and important in predicting slope failures. Based on
displacement measurements in the secondary creep range, Saito
(1965) proposed an empirical model to predict slope failure time by
analysis of the constant strain rate from the relative displacement
curve. After that, Saito (1969) extended his theory for impending
forecasting by formulating the relationship between the time left
before failure and the displacement. Fukuzono (1985) presented a
new method for predicting slope failure time using the inverse of
surface displacement velocity based on large-scale laboratory
experiments. Based on these achievements, slope displacement
analysis and prediction have been approached with many other
techniques. A predictive model was presented for predicting
seismically induced landslide displacements. Seismic slope stability
was measured in terms of critical acceleration derived from
displacement analysis, which depends on the mechanical soil
properties, and pore pressure (Romeo 2000). Landslide displacement
was observed by monitoring groundwater composition for the
purpose of estimating future landslide occurrence (Sakai 2001). Some
regression models were obtained from estimating the coseismal
landslide displacement by predicting the Newmark displacement
(Newmark 1965) in terms of the critical acceleration ratio, critical
acceleration ratio and earthquake magnitude, arias intensity and
critical acceleration, and arias intensity and critical acceleration ratio
(Jibson 2007). The inverse velocity method derived from
displacement curves was successfully applied to predict large range
slope failures in open pit mines by displacement monitoring and
analysis (Rose and Hungr 2007). A typical pattern of landslide
displacement was identified for shallow landslides, debris produced
by the excavation and gabions, metallic walls, anchored bulkheads
distribution, and slope geometry (Bozzano et al. 2011). These works
discussed the LDA with various field-monitored factors such as the
seismic features, material properties, and pore water presence.
Besides the above achievements, slope or landslide displacements
are also analyzed and predicted with some time series techniques,
including the Verhulst model (Li et al. 1996), exponential smoothing
model (Liu et al. 2009a), and grey model (Chen and Wang 1988; Liu et
al. 2009b). Comparisons of these models (Yang and Liu 2005; Yi 2007)
have been discussed and lead to the fact that these models all have
some limitations. Each of the models has a definite form of equation
which indicates that the model is mainly valid for landslide
displacements with similar features. In fact, each of the former types
of models involves an exponential function with varying parameters
to be adjusted by observations. These limitations make it necessary to
continue the research work on proper predictive models. Recently,
some computational intelligence techniques such as the artificial
neural network (ANN) (Mayoraza and Vullietb 2002; Chen and Zeng
2012; Lv and Liu 2012; Du et al. 2013), support vector machines (SVMs)
(Feng et al. 2004; Dong et al. 2007; Zhu and Hu 2013), and the Gaussian
process (GP) (Liu et al. 2012) have been successfully applied for
analysis and prediction of landslide displacement and some related
subjects (Li et al. 2012; Grelle and Guadagno 2012; Liu et al. 2013; Belle
et al. 2013; Lian et al. 2013). These works showed the potential ability of
the corresponding methods to analyze the engineering problems such
as the landslide displacement prediction.
However, there is almost no work made in view of comparing
these computational intelligence methods for LDA. Such a
comparison could be useful to evaluate the performance and
validity domain of each method. The present study aims to give
a comparative study on the computational intelligence approaches
including the Gaussian process (Rasmussen and Williams 2006),
support vector machines (Cortes and Vapnik 1995; Vapnik 1998),
and relevance vector machines (RVMs) (Tipping 2000, 2001) for
predictive analysis of landslide displacement. The three techniques
are typical computational intelligence approaches widely used in
Landslides
 Original Paper
engineering applications. They are derived from three different
points of views as described below in detail. In order to perform
this comparative study, two representative landslides, one
mudslide in France and one colluvial landslide in China, are
illustrated. The three computational intelligence methods
mentioned above will be applied to predict in situ displacements
in these two slopes. The results obtained from the three methods
will be analyzed and compared.
Landslide displacement prediction formulation and methods
approaches. As given below, different approaches make the
mapping f in varying ways.
Support vector machines
The SVM is based on Mercer's condition. Given the training
samples D=(X,S)=(xi, si)in=1, n is the sample number. The SVMs
make mapping of the samples with a linear regression function
sðxÞ ¼ ðw⋅ϕðxÞÞ þ b ð2Þ

Mathematical formulation where w is the weight vector, b is bias, and ϕ(x) is the
Landslide displacement obtained by instruments in field nonlinear mapping from the input space to the output space.
monitoring is usually a series of scatter numbers which can be In addition to performing linear mapping, SVMs can
treated as time series data. This kind of data can be easily denoted efficiently perform nonlinear mapping using the kernel trick,
mathematically in the following way. implicitly mapping their inputs into high-dimensional feature
Let si (i=0, 1, 2,…, n) be the ith observed value at time xi, spaces.
and then, the landslide displacement domain can be written Suppose all the observed displacement samples can be mapped
as S=(s 0 , s 1 ,…, s i ,…, s n ) versus the corresponding time well with a linear function with precision ε. The purpose of SVM
domain which can be written as X=(x0, x1,…, xi,…, xn). The training is to minimize the following equation:
purpose of the LDA is to find an appropriate mapping f
!
between S and X, i.e., 1
T X n
min ϕðw; ξi ; ξi  Þ ¼ min ww þ C ξi ð3Þ
2
S ¼ f ðX Þ ð1Þ i¼1

Then, prediction of LDA can be executed by mapping with new
input xm (m=n+1, n+2,…) in order to produce the unknown
displacement sm where n is the number of training samples.
The accuracy of the predicted output sm depends completely on
the ability of the mapping f and quality of data. In practical
analysis, we think that the observed data are in good quality for
analyses. In this way, the target is to find the optimal mapping(s),
which is the potential ability of computational intelligence
where the constant C>0 is the penalty factor denoting the
punishing level of the samples with errors over ε, ξi, and ξi* which
are the nonnegative slack variables.
Therefore, using the Lagrangian, this optimization problem can
be converted into a dual form which is a quadratic programming
problem where the objective function is solely dependent on a set
of Lagrange multipliers αi; the problem can be rewritten as (John
1998)

( )
1X X

 X X
n n n n
max − ðαi −αi  Þ α j −α j  K xi ; x j −ε ðαi −αi  Þ þ si ðαi −αi  Þ
2 i¼1 j¼1 i¼1 i¼1
Xn
S:t ðαi −αi  Þ ¼ 0 ðαi ; αi  ∈½0; cÞ ð4Þ
i¼1

where n is the number of training sample; K(xi,xj)=ϕ(xi)ϕ(xj) is
the kernel function. There are many kernel functions, such as the
multinomial kernel, sigmoid kernel, and radial basis function
(RBF) kernel.
In this way, the prediction model of the SVMs can be obtained as
where ∈i is a zero-mean white noise process with variance σ2, i.e.,
p(∈i| σ2)=Ν(∈i| 0,σ2).
Considering noise precision β instead of its variance σ2, i.e.,
posing β=σ2, and assuming the independence of the samples ti, the
likelihood of the complete training data set is

Xn  1 
f ðx Þ ¼ ðαi −αi  ÞK ðxi ; xÞ þ b ð5Þ pðsjX; w; βÞ ¼ ð2πβ−1 Þ−N=2 exp − β ks−Φwk2 ð7Þ
i¼1 2
Relevance vector machines where Φ=[8(x1),8(x2),…,8(xn)]t is a N×(N+1) matrix.
The RVM regression has a similar form as the SVM; it employs Using Bayes rule and the properties of Gaussian functions, the
model (2) with an additive noise term to link the vector input xi posterior distribution of the weight can be also described by the
and scalar target variable si Gaussian as follows:

si ¼ f ðxi ; wÞ þ ∈i ð6Þ pðwjX; s; α; β Þ ¼ N ðwjm; Σ Þ ð8Þ

Landslides
where α=[α0, α1,…, αN]t, a N+1 vector of hyperparameters representing where mi is the ith element of the estimated posterior weight w,
the precision on the parameters; m=β ∑Φ t t , Σ = (A + β Φ t Φ ) −1, with and Σii is the ith diagonal element of the posterior covariance
A=diag (α0,…, αN), a diagonal matrix of precisions. matrix Σ.
Values of α and β can then be obtained iteratively, using the Once the iteration has converged to the “most probable” values
following update rules (Tipping 2001): αMP and βMP, the distribution of the target value t* for a new data
input x* is also Gaussian and can be estimated through (Phillips et
1−αi Σ ii kt−Φmk2 al. 2011)
αnew
i ¼ ; ðβnew Þ−1 ¼ XN ð9Þ
m2i N− i−1 ð1−αi Σ ii Þ


pðs* jX; s; αMP ; β MP Þ ¼ ∫pðs* jX; w; β MP ÞpðwjX; s; αMP ; βMP Þdw ¼ N s* jmt ϕðx Þ; σ2* (10)

Gaussian process
The Gaussian process represents the posterior distribution over
functions based on training data and prior distribution. The
Gaussian process f(x) is a collection of random variables, any finite
set which has a joint Gaussian distribution (Rasmussen and Williams
2006). Its statistical characteristics are completely specified by its
mean function m(x) and covariance function k(x,x'), i.e.,
f ðxÞeGPðmðxÞ; kðx; x0 ÞÞ
mðxÞ ¼ Ε½ f ðxÞ
kðx; x0 Þ ¼ Ε½ð f ðxÞ−mðxÞÞ−ð f ðx0 Þ−mðx0 ÞÞ
Given the observations and the predictive input x* (also named
test input), the goal of the Gaussian process modeling is to obtain
the output y* for the distribution P(y*|X,S,x*). Suppose the prior
distribution of observation target s satisfies y∼N(0,k(x,x')) and the
independent noise ε obeys ε~N(0,σn2), thus, the covariance of
noisy observations is obtained



cov sp ; sq ¼ k xp ; xq þ σ2n δpq or covðsÞ ¼ K ðX; X Þ þ σ2n I ð12Þ
where K(X,X) is a positive definite covariance matrix with size
n×n, and its elements denote the correlations of different
observation samples.
The result is not a single value, but a probability distribution of
predictions. This advantage can be used to obtain prediction
intervals describing a degree of confidence of the predictions
(Liu et al. 2012).
Result and comparison
Each of the above techniques has some parameters to be adjusted,
for example, the kernel type and penalty parameter c in the SVM,
the kernel type and width value in the RVM, and the covariance
and length scale in the GP. In practical problems, these methods
ð11Þ are trained first with the training data to optimize the model
parameters and then to give predictions on the test data set with
the optimized models. The predictions of training data can be
treated as the curve fitting results, while the output of test data
can be thought as the forecasting. Both the curve fitting and
forecasting are discussed as follows for the nonlinear
displacements of two landslides. These above strategies are
executed in Matlab2012a.
Baishuihe landslide
The Baishuihe landslide, in the Zigui town on the south of Yangtze
River and 56 km to the west of the Three Gorges Dam, occurred in
July 2007. The landslide spreads an area of 4.2×105 km2 with an
estimated volume of 12,600 m3. It has a maximum length of 780 m
14

Consequently, the joint distribution of the observed targets and 13

the predictions can be signified as ANN SVM
12
Displacement (×102mm)

RVM GP

    11
 Observed
y K ðX; X Þ þ σ2n K ðX; X  Þ
N 0; ð13Þ 10
f e K ðX  ; X Þ K ðX  ; X  Þ
9

8
For notation simplicity, K=K (X, X), K*= K(X, X*); the regression
equation of GP for noisy observed target is obtained 7

6
Dec-06
Oct-06

Jan-07

May-07

Jul-07
Nov-06

Nov-06

Apr-07

Apr-07

Jun-07
Sep-06

Feb-07

Mar-07



f 
X; y; X  eN  f  ; cov f 
h
i  −1
Time

ð14Þ
f  ¼ Ε f 
X; y; X  ¼ K  T K þ σ2n I y

  −1 Fig. 1 Observed displacements and fitted values of different methods for point
cov f  ¼ K ðX  ; X  Þ−K  T K þ σ2n I K  ZG93 in the Baishuihe landslide

Landslides
 Original Paper
and the width of 700 m. It extends from an elevation of 75 m up to
390 m and displays a superficial cracking and distinct ground
displacement. The landslide is a typical retrogressive landslide
(Du et al. 2013). The displacement of the point ZG93 measured
by GPS is shown in Fig. 1. It can be observed apparently that the
displacement of the Baishuihe landslide shows a typical nonlinear
characteristic. Especially in the imminent period (3 months before
occurrence), the landslide displacement increases intensively, up
to 200 mm/month. The above mentioned computational
techniques are applied to give fitting values and predictions of
the observed displacement series.
Displacement fitting comparison
Firstly, in order to show the outstanding performance of the
discussed approaches, the displacement series are analyzed as
the curve fitting problem as in the previous work (Du et al. 2013)
where the BP ANN is used. The results of all the approaches are
obtained as shown in Fig. 1. In the SVM modeling, the RBF kernel
is used with the penalty parameter c=500. In the RVM modeling,
the Gaussian kernel is used with width value of 1.10. In the GP
modeling, the square exponential covariance is used with the
length scale of 2.0. As it is shown in Fig. 1, the fitting results of
SVM, RVM, and GP are very close to the corresponding observed
displacement values, even at the catastrophe points of the
displacement series. On the contrary, either the RVM or the GP
produces an excellent fitting at the last observation. However, the
SVM performs still much better than the ANN. Thus, the three
methods perform much better than the ANN in fitting the
landslide displacement.
The model performance of each method is shown in Fig. 2
quantitatively with regression R2 value of the fitted values versus
monitored displacements. It is shown apparently that the SVM,
RVM, and GP perform much better than the ANN in fitting the
landslide displacement given in the literature. Also, as it is shown
in Fig. 2, the GP performs best and the RVM performs better than
the SVM. Hence, the GP shows slightly superior ability than the
RVM and SVM in fitting the landslide displacement.
13
ANN SVM
GP RVM
12 Linear (ANN) Linear (SVM)
Linear (GP) Linear (RVM)
Predicted Displacement((×102mm)
11
GP: R² = 0.9998
ANN: R² = 0.9415
10
SVM: R² = 0.9976
9 GP
8 RVM: R² = 0.999
7 7
6
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Monitored displacement(×102mm)
Fig. 2 Fitting performance of SVM, RVM, and GP on Baishuihe landslide displacements
Landslides
Prediction comparison
One significant purpose of the LDA is to predict the landslide
behaviors according to the obtained data. Thus, it is more
interesting of the prediction than the fitting of landslide
displacement with practical considerations. Hence, the landslide
displacement is analyzed in the predictive point of view so as to
show the predictive performance of the mentioned strategies.
The cross-validation technique has been applied to utilize
substantially the few data points since only 11 months of data are
obtained before the landslide occurrence. The leave-one-out
method (Rasmussen and Williams 2006) is used in the modeling,
i.e., each time using d(1<d<n) samples with d−1 samples for
training and the dth sample for testing. In this analysis, d=5 after
pilot calculations.
In the SVM analysis, the RBF kernel is used with optimal
penalty parameter c=500; in the RVM analysis, the Gaussian kernel
is used with the optimal width value of 3.10; in the GP analysis, the
square exponential covariance is used with the optimal length
scale of 3.0. These parameters are adjusted with pilot calculations.
The predicted results are given in Fig. 3. We can find in Figs. 1 and
3 that these models perform not so well in this analysis as those in
the former displacement fitting. Especially in the prediction of the
catastrophe points, none of the methods can generate excellent
results as that in fitting problems. However, this is reasonable
because we are making predictions here.
Comparing the predictive results of the three methods, we can
conclude that the GP performs best, and the RVM performs better
than the SVM. The predictive percentage errors in Fig. 4 have
shown this more obviously. During the period of September 2006
and April 2007, the RVM produces the smallest predictive
percentage error values, i.e., no more than 2 %. The SVM also
produces values of percentage errors less than 2 % before April
2007 compared with those of GP which are less than 4 %. Thus, the
RVM performs much better than the SVM and GP at the steady
points of the displacement curve. However, the predictive error
bars of the GP are much smaller than those of the SVM and RVM
at the catastrophe points as shown in Fig. 4. This ability is more
useful for the purpose of landslide imminent forecasting.
In many landslide forecasting models, the displacement rate is
one of the widely used variables. As we can see in Fig. 3, the GP
prediction curve and the RVM prediction curve follow well the
trends of the observed displacement curve at the imminent period
of the landslide, which should imply that they have similar
14
13 Observed
Displacement((×102mm)
12 SVM
11 RVM
10
9
8
6
Nov-06
Oct-06
Nov-06
Jan-07
Dec-06
Jul-07
Apr-07
Mar-07
Apr-07
Jun-07
May-07
Sep-06
Feb-07
13
Monitoring Time
Fig. 3 Predictive performance of SVM, RVM, and GP on Baishuihe landslide displacement
 30
extensometer located close to the infiltration area of the mudslide,
25
is shown in Fig. 5. The displacement series have shown the key
features of the mudslide before its occurrence. As it is shown in
SVM
Fig. 5, the monitored mudslide displacements show a typical
Percentage Error(%)

20 RVM
GP creeping characteristic. The displacements of the mudslide
15 increase progressively with a growing displacement rate as the
monitoring time lasts. We apply the SVM, RVM, and GP methods
10 for predicting the landslide displacement series.

5 Displacement fitting comparison

We first apply the GP, SVM, and RVM to fit the observed
0
displacements of the Super-Sauze mudslide. The results are shown
Jan-07

Jul-07
Apr-07
Feb-07

Mar-07

Monitoring Time
Fig. 4 Percentage errors of the SVM, RVM, and GP on the prediction of Baishuihe
landslide displacement
displacement rate values. This ability is particularly useful if we
apply these methods together with those landslide forecasting
models above. We can use these methods to give predictions of
the displacement before the next observation can be obtained.
More practically, supposing we are in June 2007, we make
prediction of the displacement in July 2007 with the GP or RVM;
thus, we can get the same displacement rate in advance to forecast
the landslide occurrence.
Hence, in short, the GP performs best. The RVM shows better
ability than the SVM in the LDA of the Baishuihe landslide. This
phenomenon is stated above not only in fitting the displacement
curve but also in predicting and tracking the trends of the
monitored displacement curve of the Baishuihe landslide.
Super-Sauze mudslide
The Super-Sauze mudslide, consisted of a silty sand matrix mixed
with moraine debris in the southern French Alps, is a flow-like
landslide characterized by a complex vertical structure with a slip
surface and a viscoplastic plug. The landslide displacements were
monitored by different techniques, like the benchmark technique,
extensometers, inclinometers, and terrestrial laser scanning during
5 days from July 10 to 14, 2007 with one scan acquisition per day
(Travelletti et al. 2008). The displacement, obtained using an
140
135
GP Fitting
RVM Fitting
130
6-PolyRegression
Displacement (cm)
Jun-07
May-07
in Fig. 5. Besides the mentioned methods, the poly regression is
also applied to give an overall fitting of the displacement. As can
be seen from Fig. 5, all these methods perform very well in fitting
the observed displacements of the Super-Sauze landslides. They
can fit the tendency of the displacement curve satisfactorily.
Especially the GP, it almost obtains perfect fitting results in both
tendency fitting and point fitting.
During the fittings of the poly regression methods, we have
found that the six-order poly regression equation performs much
better than the other order (e.g., two-, three-, four-, or five-order)
poly regression equations. This phenomenon, on one hand, shows
that the landslide displacements should be fitted by the
polynomials with six orders. On the other hand, it indicates that
the fitting of the displacement needs to pilot calculations in order
to obtain good fitting performance with the polynomial functions.
Moreover, the fitting equations of the polynomial regression are
varying from one displacement series to another. This flaw
restricts the applicability of the polynomial regression techniques.
Prediction comparison
We again utilize the LOO cross-validation technique in the analysis
so as to compromise between the predictive performance and the
predicted step. The length of the subset is given by d=11. In the
SVM analysis, the RBF kernel is used with optimal penalty
parameter c=10; in the RVM analysis, the Gaussian kernel is used
with optimal width value of 5.96; in the GP analysis, the square
exponential covariance is used with length-scale value of 1.0. These
parameters are adjusted with pilot calculations.
The predictive errors are also shown in Fig. 6 for each method
(the SVM, RVM, and GP). We can observe that the percentage
Monitoring date(July-2007)
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
SVM Fitting 3.5 140
Monitored displacement
SVM Error 135
3
RVM Error

125 130
Predictive pencentage error (%)

Monitored displacement(cm)

y = -9E-06x6 + 0.0014x5 - 0.0747x4 + 1.851x3 - 23.852x2 2.5 GP Error

120 125
+ 154.43x - 305.42 R² = 0.9958 Monitored displacement
115 120
2
115
110
1.5
110
105
1 105
100
100
95 0.5
95
90
9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 0 90
9.4 10.1 11.3 12.6 13.4 14.5 15.4 16.7 17.7 18.7 19.5 20.3 21.1
Monitoring date(July-2007) Monitoring day (July-2007)

Fig. 5 Observed displacement and fitting values of different methods (Super- Fig. 6 Monitored displacement and predictive errors of different approaches
Sauze mudslide) (Super-Sauze mudslide)

Landslides
 Original Paper
errors of all the three methods are no more than 3.5 %, which
indicates that the three methods can perform well in predictive
modeling of the Super-Sauze mudslide displacement. Also, all the
three techniques have big values of predictive errors in the
fluctuating part of the displacement curve. For example, the
predictive percentage errors between 18 July and 19 July are much
bigger than those of the other periods in Fig. 6. This characteristic
shows that these techniques perform better in predicting the
Super-Sauze mudslide displacement for the steady part than that
for the fluctuating part.
The predictive performances of the SVM, RVM, and GP are
shown in Fig. 7. The R2 values of the regression results are given in
Fig. 7 for the corresponding predicted values by the SVM, RVM,
and GP versus the monitored displacement. Again, the R2 values
indicate that, on the whole, all the three techniques perform very
well in predicting the Super-Sauze mudslide displacement. Beside
the R2 values, the average percentage errors and the average
absolute errors are given in Fig. 8 for the predictive results of the
displacements obtained by the three methods. The two types of
error bars in Fig. 8 show that the GP performs best of all among
the three methods in generating predictions of the Super-Sauze
mudslide displacements.
Discussions
As known, the ANN has a very good nonlinear fitting ability, which
depends, however, on the condition that the network has an
appropriate structure and is well trained. In practical problems,
the structure of the neural network is difficult to identify properly,
and the neural network often suffers from the local solution
problems. Moreover, the neural network is data driven and has
no convincing equation for prediction. On the contrary, each of
the SVM, RVM, and GP is derived based on a strict mathematical
theory as demonstrated in the section “Landslide displacement
prediction formulation and methods.” Each of them thus has a
prediction equation of the definite form of formulation. Hence, the
SVM, RVM, and GP outperform the ANN in fitting the Baishuihe
landslide displacement as shown in Fig. 1.
As stated in the section “Landslide displacement prediction
formulation and methods,” the SVM, RVM, and GP obtain the
140
GP predicted
135
SVM predicted
130
RVM predicted GP: R² = 0.9978
125
Predicteddisplacement(mm)
120
115
110
105
100
95
90
90 95 100 105 110 115
Monitored displacement(mm)
Fig. 7 Predictive performance of different approaches (Super-Sauze mudslide)
Landslides
1 Average percentage error (%) Average absolute error (cm)
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
GP SVM RVM
Fig. 8 Predicted errors of different approaches (Super-Sauze mudslide)
mapping S=f(X) in slightly varying ways. The SVM establishes the
mapping by transferring the normal nonlinear data into linear
data in higher space with the kernel trick and converts the problem
into a quadratic programming problem based on the Mercer's
condition. It involves many parameters to be specified. Among
those parameters, the penalty parameter is user defined and plays
an important role for the SVMs' performance. Also, the kernel type
and kernel functions need to be optimized during the
implementation of the SVMs. These factors result in the
uncertainty of the SVMs' performance. The RVM derives the
mapping under the Bayesian framework for regression and utilizes
the sparse Bayesian kernels with probabilistic significance. It has
no restrictions defined by the Mercer's condition. Its performance
depends largely on the parameters of the kernels.
On the contrary, the GP derives the mapping from probability
theory with prior and covariance functions. Theoretically, its
performance depends on the prior and covariance functions. In
practical problems, the influences of the prior and covariance types
can be usually redeemed and manifested by the parameters of the
prior or covariance functions. Therefore, only the length-scale
parameter needs to be optimized, which facilitates the implementation
of the GP. In our practical modeling of the landslide displacement, it
turns out that as a whole, the GP performs slightly better than the SVM
and RVM as shown in Figs. 4 and 8. The reasons may lie in two aspects.
Mathematically, the GP is originally derived for regression problems;
the SVM and RVM, however, are initially proposed for classification
problems and applied for regression problems with some tricks which
result in more parameters. Furthermore, the prediction of the GP is a
probabilistic distribution, for the point-like predictions of the
landslide displacement, so the GP can apply the mean of the
SVM: R² = 0.9967 distribution as point predictions to avoid robust point predictions like
that in the SVMs. In practice, the implementation process also affects
the performance of these methods. As stated above in practice, the GP
RVM: R² = 0.9942 involves only the length-scale parameter; in contrast, the SVM and
RVM involve more parameters. This factor indeed makes it not easy to
find the best performances of the latter two.
It is shown apparently in Figs. 1, 3, 5, and 6 that the mentioned
methods can obtain very good results in both fitting and
predicting the nonfluctuating parts of the displacement series of
the two illustrated landslides. Meanwhile, these methods can also
perform well in fitting the nonfluctuating parts of the
120 125 130 135 140
displacements. However, due to the high nonlinearity and
complexity of the landslide displacement, prediction of the
fluctuations of landslide displacements is still very difficult since
the start points of the fluctuations are uncertain before their
occurrence unless the displacement curve manifests a typical
periodic feature. Unfortunately, it is not conclusive at present to
identify whether there is a period characteristic in the landslide
displacement or how to know the value of the period. Therefore,
further work can be tried to analyze the fluctuating displacement
with different components such as the progressive or creep
component, periodic component, mutation component, etc.
These three methods obtain the prediction equations based on
the history information of the landslide displacements as
demonstrated in the section “Landslide displacement prediction
formulation and methods.” Thus, besides the methods' nature, the
performances of these methods depend largely on the landslide
history displacements. The two landslide displacements shown in
Figs. 1 and 5 show, apparently, the progressive characteristics before
sliding occurrence. This feature makes the findings obtained based
on the two landslides cautious to other landslides of different
features. For example, the research findings above may be unsuitable
to account for landslide displacements triggered by earthquakes or
other kinds of seismic activities. In these cases, the slope
displacements often behave to be catastrophic features which are
mainly caused by the external accidental factors other than the
internal landslide evolutions, and thus, they are out of the range of
the methods discussed above. That is to say, the research findings are
appropriate for landslide displacements with progressive features.
Conclusions
The LDA provides a potential way for landslide time forecasting.
This study demonstrates the state-of-the-art computational
intelligence techniques, i.e., the SVM, RVM, and GP for analysis
and prediction of the landslide nonlinear displacement. Based on
the results obtained, conclusions can be made as follows:
1. The computational intelligence techniques are feasible and
capable for landslide nonlinear displacement prediction. With
optimized parameters and well-mannered data, these
techniques can perform well both in fitting and predicting
the displacement data.
2. The SVM, RVM, and GP perform superior to ANN in modeling
the Baishuihe landslide displacement. The GP, on the whole,
performs a little better than the RVM and SVM in predictive
analysis of landslide nonlinear displacement.
3. The computational intelligence methods perform better in
predictive analysis of nonfluctuating displacement series than
that of the fluctuating ones.
Nevertheless, the parameters of the SVM, RVM, and GP play an
important role in presenting good predictive performance for
landslide displacement analysis. Hence, the exact effects of these
parameters are to be discovered in the future work. Meanwhile, the
research findings in this study are appropriate for landslide
displacements with progressive features and unsuitable to account
for landslide displacements triggered by earthquakes or other
kinds of seismic activities.
Acknowledgments
Financial support from the China 973 Program for Key Basic
Research Project (no. 2011CB013504) and the China Natural
Science Foundation (no. 11272114) is gratefully acknowledged.
The authors are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their
comments and suggestions.
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