Predicting and Understanding Landslide Events with Explainable AI

Rainfall induced landslide is one of the main geological hazard in Italy and in the world. Each year it causes fatalities, casualties and economic and social losses on large populated areas. Accurate short-term predictions of landslides can be extremely important and useful, in order to both provide local authorities with efficient prediction/early warning and increase the resilience to manage emergencies. There is an extensive literature addressing the problem of computing landslide susceptibility maps (which is a classification problem exploiting a large range of static features) and only few on actual short terms predictions (spatial and temporal). The short-term prediction models are still empirical and obtain unsatisfactory results, also in the identification of the predictors. The new aspects addressed in this paper are: (i) a short-term prediction model (1 day in advance) of landslide based on machine learning, (ii) real time features as good predictors. The introduction of explainable artificial intelligence techniques allowed to understand global and local feature relevance. In order to find the best prediction model, a number of machine learning solutions have been implemented and assessed. The models obtained overcome those of the literature. The validation has been performed in the context of the Metropolitan City of Florence, data from 2013 to 2019. The method based on XGBoost achieved best results, demonstrating that it is the most reliable and robust against false alarms. Finally, we applied explainable artificial intelligence techniques locally and globally to derive a deep understand of the predictive model’s outputs and features’ relevance, and relationships. The analysis allowed us to identify the best feature for short term predictions and their impact in the local cases and global prediction model. Solutions have been implemented on Snap4City.org infrastructure.