Evaluation of different machine learning models for predicting and mapping the susceptibility of gully erosion

•Seven machine learning models were used to determine the gully susceptible areas.•GEMS maps were compared using different evaluation criteria.•Three sample data sets (S1, S2, and S3) were randomly prepared as input data.•The study applied a gully erosion inventory map for gully erosion analysis.•RF and RBF-SVM provide the best accuracies on all sample datasets (AUC > 0.9).

Gully erosion constitutes a serious problem for land degradation in a wide range of environments. The main objective of this research was to compare the performance of seven state-of-the-art machine learning models (SVM with four kernel types, BP-ANN, RF, and BRT) to model the occurrence of gully erosion in the Kashkan-Poldokhtar Watershed, Iran. In the first step, a gully inventory map consisting of 65 gully polygons was prepared through field surveys. Three different sample data sets (S1, S2, and S3), including both positive and negative cells (70% for training and 30% for validation), were randomly prepared to evaluate the robustness of the models. To model the gully erosion susceptibility, 12 geo-environmental factors were selected as predictors. Finally, the goodness-of-fit and prediction skill of the models were evaluated by different criteria, including efficiency percent, kappa coefficient, and the area under the ROC curves (AUC). In terms of accuracy, the RF, RBF-SVM, BRT, and P-SVM models performed excellently both in the degree of fitting and in predictive performance (AUC values well above 0.9), which resulted in accurate predictions. Therefore, these models can be used in other gully erosion studies, as they are capable of rapidly producing accurate and robust gully erosion susceptibility maps (GESMs) for decision-making and soil and water management practices. Furthermore, it was found that performance of RF and RBF-SVM for modelling gully erosion occurrence is quite stable when the learning and validation samples are changed.