Earthquake Prediction Using Deep Neural Networks

Abstract

Reliable prediction of earthquakes has numerous societal and engineering benefits. In recent years, the exponentially rising volume of seismic data has led to the development of several automatic earthquake detection algorithms through machine learning approaches. In this study, we propose a fully functional and efficient earthquake detector cum forecaster based on deep neural networks of long-short-term memory (LSTM) units. The model captures inherent temporal characteristics of earthquake data. For illustration, we consider an earthquake catalog from the Himalaya and its neighboring regions. The proposed LSTM model shows satisfactory performance for small to medium-sized earthquakes. We also implement a baseline artificial neural network (ANN) model to perform a suitable comparison. It is observed that both ANN and LSTM models fail to produce desired result for large events.