The Impact of Tectonic Setting on Machine Learning Approaches for
Earthquake Prediction
Abstract
In prior decades the concept of using mathematical methods to predict
earthquakes was considered infeasible. Recent advances in machine
learning and predictive modeling offer promising avenues to potentially
realize earthquake prediction. In order to test the viability of machine
learning methods, experiments were made with earthquake datasets from
Kansas and Puerto Rico. The two datasets were chosen for the distinct
differences in their tectonic settings. Kansas has few major faults,
with a largely inactive subsurface, this produced a smaller dataset with
a few large clusters. Puerto Rico is complexly faulted, with an
extremely active tectonic setting, this produced a larger dataset with a
large number of small clusters. In order to test the effectiveness of
these two datasets for machine learning and prediction they were run
through three different machine learning algorithms including an LSTM
model, Bi-LSTM model, Bi-LSTM model with attention. Not only were the
three different machine learning methods compared against each other for
accuracy but also the datasets as well. Conclusive findings show that
the two different data sets favor different processing methods. The
Kansas data performs the best with the Bi-LSTM with attention model,
while the Puerto Rico data performs the best with the LSTM model. This
is likely due to the tectonic settings of the two regions, since the
Kansas dataset has less overall data, and earthquakes are concentrated
in a few large clusters, while the Puerto Rico data set has a more even
distribution.