Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Earthquake Source
Characterization
Abstract
Accurate earthquake location and magnitude estimation play critical
roles in seismology. Recent deep learning frameworks have produced
encouraging results on various seismological tasks (e.g., earthquake
detection, phase picking, seismic classification, and earthquake early
warning). Most existing machine learning earthquake location methods
utilize waveform information from a single station. However, multiple
stations contain more complete information for earthquake source
characterization. Inspired by recent successes in applying graph neural
networks in graph-structured data, we develop a Spatio-Temporal Graph
Convolutional Neural Network (STGCN) for estimating earthquake locations
and magnitudes. Our graph neural network leverages geographical and
waveform information from multiple stations to construct graphs
automatically and dynamically by an adaptive feature integration
process. Given input waveforms collected from multiple stations, the
neural network constructs different graphs and fuses spatial-temporal
consistency effectively from various stations based on graphs’ edges.
Using a recent graph neural network and a fully convolutional neural
network as baselines, we apply STGCN to earthquakes cataloged by
Southern California Seismic Network from 2000 to 2019 and induced
earthquakes collected in Oklahoma from 2014 to 2015. STGCN yields more
accurate earthquake locations than those obtained by the baseline models
and performs comparably in terms of depth and magnitude prediction,
though the ability to predict depth and magnitude remains weak for all
tested models. Our work demonstrates the potential of using graph neural
networks and multiple stations for better automatic estimation of
earthquake epicenters.