Interpretable Multivariate Landslide Displacement Forecasting Based on InSAR and Deep Learning: PatchTST with Learnable Channel Fusion

Accurate time series forecasting is fundamental to geohazard early warning, yet remains a major challenge. Conventional in situ geotechnical monitoring remains costly and spatially constrained, whereas deep learning applied to remote sensing data has become increasingly prevalent but often suffers from opacity of model decision-making. To address this issue, we propose a Transformer-based forecasting framework, namely PatchTST-Fusion, adapted for multivariate Multi-Temporal Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (MT-InSAR) time series. The framework integrates model interpretability analysis through TimeSHAP, providing temporal and feature-level attributions across the input sequence. Landslide deformation time series are first derived from Copernicus Sentinel-1 SAR data. Variational Mode Decomposition is then applied to decompose the non-linear signals into trend, seasonal, and noise components. The denoised displacement series are modeled and forecast using the proposed PatchTST-Fusion, which incorporates rainfall and reservoir water level fluctuations as feature-level drivers. Application to the Daping landslide cluster in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area in China demonstrates that our method captures both the long-term and transient non-linear coupling between deformation and its triggers, surpassing state-of-the-art models including CNN-BiGRU-Attention, Informer and original PatchTST with 7–55% improvements in MAE and 10–52% improvements in RMSE. Beyond predictive gains, feature attribution of environmental triggers via TimeSHAP reveals that rainfall and reservoir regulation exert temporally distinct influences on slope kinematics, with high relative importance concentrated in specific periods and characteristic lagged responses. This interpretable framework provides both enhanced forecasting accuracy and process-based insights, offering a broadly applicable tool for landslide early warning in reservoir regions.