Landslide susceptibility assessment in Constantine region (NE Algeria) by means of statistical models

The purpose of the present study was to compare the prediction performances of three statistical methods, namely, information value (IV), weight of evidence (WoE) and frequency ratio (FR), for landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) at the east of Constantine region. A detailed landslide inventory of the study area with a total of 81 landslide locations was compiled from aerial photographs, satellite images and field surveys. This landslide inventory was randomly split into a testing dataset (70%) for training the models, and the remaining (30%) was used for validation purpose. Nine landslide-related factors such as slope gradient, slope aspect, elevation, distance to streams, lithology, distance to lineaments, precipitation, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and stream density were used in the landslide susceptibility analyses. The inventory was adopted to analyse the spatial relationship between these landslide factors and landslide occurrences. Based on IV, WoE and FR approaches, three landslide susceptibility zonation maps were categorized, namely, “very high, high, moderate, low, and very low”. The results were compared and validated by computing area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). From the statistics, it is noted that prediction scores of the FR, IV and WoE models are relatively similar with 73.32%, 73.95% and 79.07%, respectively. However, the map, obtained using the WoE technique, was experienced to be more suitable for the study area. Based on the results, the produced LSM can serve as a reference for planning and decision-making regarding the general use of the land.