Transfer Learning with Attributes for Improving the Landslide Spatial Prediction Performance in Sample-Scarce Area Based on Variational Autoencoder Generative Adversarial Network

Owing to the complexity of obtaining the landslide inventory data, it is a challenge to establish a landslide spatial prediction model with limited labeled samples. This paper proposed a novel strategy, namely transfer learning with attributes (TLAs), to make good use of existing landslide inventory data, a strategy that is based on a variational autoencoder of a generative adversarial network (VAEGAN) for improving the landslide spatial prediction performance in sample-scarce areas. Different from transfer learning (TL), TLAs are pretraining the model with the data reconstructed by VAEGAN, so that the models learn in advance the landslide attributes of sample-scarce areas. Accordingly, a database containing a total of 986 landslides in three study areas with 14 landslide-influencing factors was established, and each of the three models, i.e., convolutional neural networks (CNNs), bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and gated recurrent units (GRUs), was respectively selected as the feature extractor of the VAEGAN to reconstruct the data with attributes and the prediction model to generate the landslide susceptibility maps to investigate and validate the proposed TLA strategy. The experimental results showed that the TLA strategy increased the mean value of evaluators, such as the area under the receiver-operating characteristic (AUROC), F1-score, precision, recall and accuracy by about 2–7% compared with TL, results that indicated that the generated data have the attribute of specific study areas and the effectiveness of TLA strategy in sample-scare areas.