Performance of combined artificial neural networks for forecasting landslide displacement

An efficient and accurate method for landslide displacement prediction is very important to reduce the casualties and property losses caused by this type of natural hazard. In recent years, many kinds of artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been widely applied to landslide displacement prediction. But we can´t know which type of ANN is the best until we have calculated the prediction error. An improper choice of ANN may result in bad prediction results. In this paper, we use a neural networks combination prediction method based on the discounted MSFE (mean squared forecast error) to reduce the risk of selecting the types of ANNs. Four popular ANNs, radial basis function neural network (RBFNN), support vector regression (SVR), least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) and extreme learning machine (ELM), are selected as candidate neural networks. The performance of our model is verified through two case studies in Baishuihe landslide and Bazimen landslide. Experimental results reveal that the combining neural networks can improve the generalization abilities of ANNs.