Earthquake forecast by imbalance machine learning using geophysical predictors

Abstract

In the present paper we consider the earthquake forecast as a binary problem of machine learning on the imbalanced data base applied to five regions of Georgia. For the training we used geophysical data base collected in 2017-2021, namely, variations of statistical characteristics of geomagnetic field components, seismic activity, water level in deep boreholes and tides. In this version a new predictor – the weighted seismic activity for previous 5 days - – is added compared to the predictors’ list used in previous papers. Besides, the length of the used database is increased 3 times compared to the earlier results. As in the database the earthquakes of M > 3.5 are rare, the number of negative cases is large (there are many days without EQs of M > 3.5), meaning that there is a strong imbalance between positive and negative cases of the order of 1:20; we apply the specific methodology Matthews’ correlation coefficient (MCC) and F1 score to avoid the strong imbalance effect.