Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2010 (2010), Article ID 901095, 15 pages
doi:10.1155/2010/901095
Research Article

Assessment of Landslide Susceptibility by Decision Trees in the Metropolitan Area of Istanbul, Turkey

H. A. Nefeslioglu,1 E. Sezer,2 C. Gokceoglu,3 A. S. Bozkir,2 and T. Y. Duman1

1Department of Geological Research, General Directorate of Mineral Research and Exploration, 06520 Ankara, Turkey
2Department of Computer Engineering, Hacettepe University, Beytepe, 06800 Ankara, Turkey
3Department of Geological Engineering, Hacettepe University, Beytepe, 06800 Ankara, Turkey

Received 29 October 2009; Accepted 29 November 2009

Academic Editor: Cristian Toma

Copyright © 2010 H. A. Nefeslioglu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The main purpose of the present study is to investigate the possible application of decision tree in landslide susceptibility assessment. The study area having a surface area of 174.8 km2 locates at the northern coast of the Sea of Marmara and western part of Istanbul metropolitan area. When applying data mining and extracting decision tree, geological formations, altitude, slope, plan curvature, profile curvature, heat load and stream power index parameters are taken into consideration as landslide conditioning factors. Using the predicted values, the landslide susceptibility map of the study area is produced. The AUC value of the produced landslide susceptibility map has been obtained as 89.6%. According to the results of the AUC evaluation, the produced map has exhibited a good enough performance.