Prediction of landslide displacement with dynamic features using intelligent approaches

Landslide displacement prediction can enhance the efficacy of landslide monitoring system, and the prediction of the periodic displacement is particularly challenging. In the previous studies, static regression models (e.g., support vector machine (SVM)) were mostly used for predicting the periodic displacement. These models may have bad performances, when the dynamic features of landslide triggers are incorporated. This paper proposes a method for predicting the landslide displacement in a dynamic manner, based on the gated recurrent unit (GRU) neural network and complete ensemble empirical decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN). The CEEMDAN is used to decompose the training data, and the GRU is subsequently used for predicting the periodic displacement. Implementation procedures of the proposed method were illustrated by a case study in the Caojiatuo landslide area, and SVM was also adopted for the periodic displacement prediction. This case study shows that the predictors obtained by SVM are inaccurate, as the landslide displacement is in a pronouncedly step-wise manner. By contrast, the accuracy can be significantly improved using the dynamic predictive method. This paper reveals the significance of capturing the dynamic features of the inputs in the training process, when the machine learning models are adopted to predict the landslide displacement.