Short-term displacement prediction for newly established monitoring slopes based on transfer learning

This study makes a significant progress in addressing the challenges of short-term slope displacement prediction in the Universal Landslide Monitoring Program, an unprecedented disaster mitigation program in China, where lots of newly established monitoring slopes lack sufficient historical deformation data, making it difficult to extract deformation patterns and provide effective predictions which plays a crucial role in the early warning and forecasting of landslide hazards. A slope displacement prediction method based on transfer learning is therefore proposed. Initially, the method transfers the deformation patterns learned from slopes with relatively rich deformation data by a pre-trained model based on a multi-slope integrated dataset to newly established monitoring slopes with limited or even no useful data, thus enabling rapid and efficient predictions for these slopes. Subsequently, as time goes on and monitoring data accumulates, fine-tuning of the pre-trained model for individual slopes can further improve prediction accuracy, enabling continuous optimization of prediction results. A case study indicates that, after being trained on a multi-slope integrated dataset, the TCN-Transformer model can efficiently serve as a pre-trained model for displacement prediction at newly established monitoring slopes. The three-day average RMSE is significantly reduced by 34.6% compared to models trained only on individual slope data, and it also successfully predicts the majority of deformation peaks. The fine-tuned model based on accumulated data on the target newly established monitoring slope further reduced the three-day RMSE by 37.2%, demonstrating a considerable predictive accuracy. In conclusion, taking advantage of transfer learning, the proposed slope displacement prediction method effectively utilizes the available data, which enables the rapid deployment and continual refinement of displacement predictions on newly established monitoring slopes.