Improved Landslide Deformation Prediction Using Convolutional Neural Network–Gated Recurrent Unit and Spatial–Temporal Data

As one of the major forms of geological disaster, landslides cause huge casualties and economic losses in China every year. Given the importance of landslide prediction, it is a challenging task due to difficulties in efficiently leveraging the spatial–temporal information for enhanced prediction. This paper presents a novel spatial–temporal enhanced CNN-GRU model to improve landslide predictions with the following contributions. First, this paper explicitly models the spatial correlation in the dataset and constructs a spatial–temporal time-sequence deformation prediction model that greatly improves landslide predictions. This model integrates the spatial correlation of monitoring points into time-series deformation prediction to improve the prediction of landslide deformation trends. Second, we develop a complete data processing pipeline involving SBAS-InSAR, time-series data preprocessing, spatial–temporal homogeneous point selection and weighting, as well as CNN-GRU model training. The pipeline is tailor-designed to leverage the spatial–temporal correlation in the data to enhance the prediction performance. Third, we apply the proposed model to monitor landslide deformation around Woda Village, Chamdo City, Tibet. The results show that the root mean square error (RMSE) of the monitoring points in the landslide area is reduced by about 20.9% and the number of points with an RMSE of less than 3 mm is increased by 12.9%, leading to a significant improvement in prediction accuracy.