Enriching Representation and Enhancing Nearest Neighbor Classification of Slope/Landslide Data Using Rectified Feature Line Segments and Hypersphere-Based Scaling: A Reproducible Experimental Comparison

Abstract

Measuring geotechnical and natural hazard engineering features, along with pattern recognition algorithms, allows us to categorize the stability of slopes into two main classes of interest: stable or at risk of collapse. The problem of slope stability can be further generalized to that of assessing landslide susceptibility. Many different methods have been applied to these problems, ranging from simple to complex, and often with a scarcity of available data. Simple classification methods are preferred for the sake of both parsimony and interpretability, as well as to avoid drawbacks such as overtraining. In this paper, an experimental comparison was carried out for three simple but powerful existing variants of the well-known nearest neighbor rule for classifying slope/landslide data. One of the variants enhances the representational capacity of the data using so-called feature line segments, while all three consider the concept of a territorial hypersphere per prototype feature point. Additionally, this experimental comparison is entirely reproducible, as Python implementations are provided for all the methods and the main simulation, and the experiments are performed using three publicly available datasets: two related to slope stability and one for landslide susceptibility. Results show that the three variants are very competitive and easily applicable.