EPT: A data-driven transformer model for earthquake prediction

Abstract

The leading causes of earthquakes are crustal movements, plate movements, and collisions. In recent years, many researchers in earthquake prediction have been predicting earthquakes from historical seismic data in local areas. This approach ignores the underlying internal patterns of crustal motion, plate movement, and collisions. This paper proposes a purely data-driven deep learning model called EPT. The model uses gated feature extraction blocks (GFEB) to mine potential crustal motion and plate movement patterns from global historical seismic catalog data. It uses them to aid mainshock prediction in each local, provincial region. Experiments show that this approach improves model prediction accuracy by up to 50 percent. We also use multi-headed self-attention for the first time to capture long-term dependencies within regional time series, highlighting links between focal features and compensating for the difficulty of focusing on longer-term information in long-term time series with long short-term memory networks (LSTM). In addition, we also use the gradient harmonization mechanism classification (GHMC) loss function for the first time in earthquake prediction, effectively addressing the problem of uneven data distribution across different earthquake magnitude ranges. Finally, we validated the effectiveness of the EPT model in five provincial datasets in mainland China, and the experimental results all achieved an accuracy of over 90 percent.