Abstract
<strong class="journal-contentHeaderColor">Abstract.</strong> Geoelectric time series (TS) have long been studied for their potential for probabilistic earthquake forecasting, and a recent model (GEMSTIP) directly used the skewness and kurtosis of geoelectric TS to provide times of increased probability (TIPs) for earthquakes for several months in the future. We followed up on this work by applying the hidden Markov model (HMM) to the correlation, variance, skewness, and kurtosis TSs to identify two hidden states (HSs) with different distributions of these statistical indexes. More importantly, we tested whether these HSs could separate time periods into times of higher/lower earthquake probabilities. Using 0.5âHz geoelectric TS data from 20 stations across Taiwan over 7Â years, we first computed the statistical index TSs and then applied the BaumâWelch algorithm with multiple random initializations to obtain a well-converged HMM and its HS TS for each station. We then divided the map of Taiwan into a 16-by-16 grid map and quantified the forecasting skill, i.e., how well the HS TS could separate times of higher/lower earthquake probabilities in each cell in terms of a <i>discrimination power</i> measure that we defined. Next, we compare the discrimination power of empirical HS TSs against those of 400 simulated HS TSs and then organized the statistical significance values from this cellular-level hypothesis testing of the forecasting skill obtained into grid maps of <i>discrimination reliability</i>. Having found such significance values to be high for many grid cells for all stations, we proceeded with a statistical hypothesis test of the forecasting skill at the global level to find high statistical significance across large parts of the hyperparameter spaces of most stations. We therefore concluded that geoelectric TSs indeed contain earthquake-related information and the HMM approach is capable of extracting this information for earthquake forecasting.
Highlights
Earthquakes (EQs) are one of the most destructive natural hazards that can befall us, with the potential to take many human lives and deal serious damages to economies and environments
2004, an M! -9.1 (M! is the moment magnitude scale) earthquake struck near Sumatra, Indonesia, and the subsequent tsunami waves of up to 30 m high resulted in 227,898 people dead or missing
We present the results obtained for all 20 stations, as well as additional treatments that we felt are necessary to investigate whether the hidden states (HSs) time series (TSs) have significant forecasting power for EQs
Summary
Earthquakes (EQs) are one of the most destructive natural hazards that can befall us, with the potential to take many human lives and deal serious damages to economies and environments. Is the moment magnitude scale) earthquake struck near Sumatra, Indonesia, and the subsequent tsunami waves of up to 30 m high resulted in 227,898 people dead or missing. 1,740,000 people lost their homes to the tsunami in 14 countries (Survey, 2004). This will be remembered as one of the deadliest earthquakes in recorded human history. -7.9 earthquake in Sichuan, China killed over 69,000 people, and injured 374,176. As of July 2008, another 18,222 were reported missing (Sina-News, 2008). More recently on 12 January 2010, an M! -7.0 earthquake shook
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