Seismic Intensity Estimation using Machine Learning for on-site Earthquake Early Warning (EEW)

Abstract

<p>Earthquake Early Warning System (EEW) is a technology that calculates earthquake parameter using P-wave that arrives earlier and warns the expected damage area before the arrival of destructive S wave. Therefore, many countries are operating EEW to mitigate damage from earthquake shaking. Especially an on-site EEW is drawn attention as it can reduce blind zones due to using only a single or minimum station. In the on-site EEW, it is important to quickly predict the seismic intensity, which indicates the degree of ground damage, response of structures and ground shaking felt by people at a given location, rather than information on the magnitude or distance of the earthquake.</p><p>In this study, we suggest a machine learning (ML) model that can directly estimate the seismic intensity scale from initial P-waveforms of three-component acceleration data measured at a single station. We used 1D-Convolutional Neural Networks (1D-CNN), which have been shown good performance in signal processing of speech and medical data which are similar to earthquake signals. K-Net and KiK-net datasets, recorded at stations in Japan, were used for training the ML model. Since the amount of data is enough and all of data are labeled with Japan Meteorological Agency Seismic Intensity Scale (I<sub>JMA</sub>), the datasets were used as training data in this study. The developed model produced fast and accurate results using only the three-component acceleration field data at a single station.</p><p>In order to test applicability of the trained model to the new dataset acquired from other regions, the trained model was applied to the STEAD data which were recorded at stations distributed globally. When the trained model was applied to STEAD data directly, the prediction results were worse than those of K-Net and KiK-net data. The reason is that the characteristics of the ground and waveforms are different depending on the region. Therefore, to solve this problem, transfer learning was applied, and only the parameters of a fully connected layer of pretrained ML model were fine-tuned using small number of both labeled target dataset and training dataset used for pretraining. Moreover, by considering the imbalance problem of the training data for transfer learning, it was able to obtain better prediction results. Ultimately, this study shows the pretrained model with a specific region dataset can provide reasonable prediction of seismic intensity to new dataset acquired from other regions using transfer learning.</p>