Advancing predictive accuracy of shallow landslide using strategic data augmentation

Rainfall-induced shallow landslides pose one of significant geological hazards, necessitating precise monitoring and prediction for effective disaster mitigation. Most studies on landslide prediction have focused on optimizing machine learning (ML) algorithms, very limited attention has been paid to enhancing data quality for improved predictive performance. This study employs strategic data augmentation (DA) techniques to enhance the accuracy of shallow landslide prediction. Using five DA methods including singular spectrum analysis (SSA), moving averages (MA), wavelet denoising (WD), variational mode decomposition (VMD), and linear interpolation (LI), we utilize strategies such as smoothing, denoising, trend decomposition, and synthetic data generation to improve the training dataset. Four machine learning algorithms, i.e. artificial neural network (ANN), recurrent neural network (RNN), one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN1D), and long short-term memory (LSTM), are used to forecast landslide displacement. The case study of a landslide in southwest China shows the effectiveness of our approach in predicting landslide displacements, despite the inherent limitations of the monitoring dataset. VMD proves the most effective for smoothing and denoising, improving R 2 , RMSE , and MAPE by 172.16%, 71.82%, and 98.9%, respectively. SSA addresses missing data, while LI is effective with limited data samples, improving metrics by 21.6%, 52.59%, and 47.87%, respectively. This study demonstrates the potential of DA techniques to mitigate the impact of data defects on landslide prediction accuracy, with implications for similar cases.