A scientometrics review of conventional and soft computing methods in the slope stability analysis

Predicting slope stability is important for preventing and mitigating landslide disasters. This paper examines the existing approaches for analyzing slope stability. There are several established conventional approaches for slope stability analysis that can be applied in this context. However, in recent decades, soft computing methods has been extensively developed and employed in stochastic slope stability analysis, notably as surrogate models to improve computing efficiency in contrast to traditional approaches. Soft computing methods can deal with uncertainty and imprecision, which may be quantified using performance indices like coefficient of determination, in regression and accuracy in classification. This review study focuses on conventional methods such as the Bishop’s method and Janbu’s method, as well as soft computing models such as support vector machine, artificial neural network, Gaussian process regression, decision tree, etc. The advantages and limitations of soft computing techniques in relation to conventional methods have also been thoroughly covered in this paper. The achievements of soft computing methods are summarized from two aspects—predicting factor of safety and classification of slope stability. Key potential research challenges and future prospects are also given.