Generating phone-quality records to train machine learning models for smartphone-based earthquake early warning

Abstract

Earthquake early warning (EEW) system detects earthquakes and sends an early warning to areas likely to be affected, which plays a significant role in reducing earthquake risk. In recent years, as with the widespread distribution of smartphones, as well as their powerful computing ability and advanced built-in sensors, a new interdisciplinary research method of smartphone-based earthquake early warning has emerged. Some smartphone-based earthquake early warning systems have applied signal processing techniques and machine learning algorithms to the sensor data recorded by smartphones for better monitoring earthquakes. But it is challenging to collect abundant phone-recorded seismic data for training related machine learning models and selecting appropriate features for these models. One alternative way to solve this problem is to transform the data recorded by seismic networks into phone-quality data. In this paper, we propose such a transformation method by learning the differences between the data recorded by seismic networks and smartphones, in two scenarios: phone fixed and free located on tables, respectively. By doing this, we can easily generate abundant phone-quality earthquake data to train machine learning models used in EEW systems. We evaluate our transformation method by conducting various experiments, and our method performs much better than existing methods. Furthermore, we set up a case study where we use the transformed records to train machine learning models for earthquake intensity prediction. The results show that the model trained by using our transformed data produces superior performance, suggesting that our transformation method is useful for smartphone-based earthquake early warning.