Domain-Driven Teacher–Student Machine Learning Framework for Predicting Slope Stability Under Dry Conditions

Slope stability prediction is a critical task in geotechnical engineering, but machine learning (ML) models require large datasets, which are often costly and time-consuming to obtain. This study proposes a domain-driven teacher–student framework to overcome data limitations for predicting the dry factor of safety (FS dry). The teacher model, XGBoost, was trained on the original dataset to capture nonlinear relationships among key site-specific features (unit weight, cohesion, friction angle) and assign pseudo-labels to synthetic samples generated via domain-driven simulations. Six student models, random forest (RF), decision tree (DT), shallow artificial neural network (SNN), linear regression (LR), support vector regression (SVR), and K-nearest neighbors (KNN), were trained on the augmented dataset to approximate the teacher’s predictions. Models were evaluated using a train–test split and five-fold cross-validation. RF achieved the highest predictive accuracy, with an R2 of up to 0.9663 and low error metrics (MAE = 0.0233, RMSE = 0.0531), outperforming other student models. Integrating domain knowledge and synthetic data improved prediction reliability despite limited experimental datasets. The framework provides a robust and interpretable tool for slope stability assessment, supporting infrastructure safety in regions with sparse geotechnical data. Future work will expand the dataset with additional field and laboratory tests to further improve model performance.