Small Earthquakes Can Help Predict Large Earthquakes: A Machine Learning Perspective

Abstract

Earthquake prediction is a long-standing problem in seismology that has garnered attention from the scientific community and the public. Despite ongoing efforts to understand the physical mechanisms of earthquake occurrence, there is no convincing physical or statistical model for predicting large earthquakes. Machine learning methods, such as random forest and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks, excel at identifying patterns in large-scale databases and offer a potential means to improve earthquake prediction performance. Differing from physical and statistical approaches to earthquake prediction, we explore whether small earthquakes can be used to predict large earthquakes within the framework of machine learning. Specifically, we attempt to answer two questions for a given region: (1) Is there a likelihood of a large earthquake (e.g., M ≥ 6.0) occurring within the next year? (2) What is the maximum magnitude of an earthquake expected to occur within the next year? Our results show that the random forest method performs best in classifying large earthquake occurrences, while the LSTM method provides a rough estimation of earthquake magnitude. We conclude that small earthquakes contain information relevant to predicting future large earthquakes and that machine learning provides a promising avenue for improving the prediction of earthquake occurrences.