Landslides are a common type of geological hazard, characterized by sudden onset, high destructiveness, and frequent occurrence, and are widely distributed in mountainous areas with complex terrain. In recent years, due to extreme weather and intensified human activities, both the frequency and intensity of landslide disasters in China have increased significantly, posing serious threats to human life, property, and socio-economic development. Although various methods for landslide susceptibility assessment have been proposed, the accuracy of existing models still needs improvement. In this context, this study takes the landslide-prone Dongchuan District of Kunming City, Yunnan Province, as a case study and proposes a coupled model that integrates an autoencoder and a feedforward neural network (AuFNN). The model uses the autoencoder to extract low-dimensional and highly discriminative feature representations, which are then used as input to the feedforward neural network to perform landslide susceptibility assessment. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model, it is compared with four commonly used models, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), XGBoost, and Feedforward Neural Network (FNN), based on performance metrics such as the ROC curve, recall, and F1 score. The results indicate that the AuFNN model provides an alternative representation learning framework and achieves performance comparable to that of established machine learning models in landslide susceptibility assessment, as reflected by similar AUC, accuracy, and F1 score values.
Li et al. (Tue,) studied this question.