NESTOREv1.0: A MATLAB Package for Strong Forthcoming Earthquake Forecasting

Abstract

This article presents the first publicly available version of the NExt STrOng Related Earthquake (NESTORE) software (NESTOREv1.0) designed for the statistical analysis of earthquake clusters. NESTOREv1.0 is a MATLAB (www.mathworks.com/products/matlab, last accessed August 2022) package capable of forecasting strong aftershocks starting from the first hours after the mainshocks. It is based on the NESTORE algorithm, which has already been successfully applied retrospectively to Italian and California seismicity. The code evaluates a set of features and uses a supervised machine learning approach to provide probability estimates for a subsequent large earthquake during a seismic sequence. By analyzing an earthquake catalog, the software identifies clusters and trains the algorithm on them. It then uses the training results to obtain forecasting for a test set of independent data to estimate training performance. After appropriate testing, the software can be used as an Operational Earthquake Forecasting (OEF) method for the next stronger earthquake. For ongoing clusters, it provides near-real-time forecasting of a strong aftershock through a traffic light classification aimed at assessing the level of concern. This article provides information about the NESTOREv1.0 algorithm and a guide to the software, detailing its structure and main functions and showing the application to recent seismic sequences in California. By making the NESTOREv1.0 software available, we hope to extend the impact of the NESTORE algorithm and further advance research on forecasting the strongest earthquakes during seismicity clusters.

Forecasting strong subsequent events in the Italian territory: a National and Regional application for NESTOREv1.0

“…For our analysis, we used the MATLAB-based toolbox NESTOREv1.0 (Gentili et al 2023) to evaluate the ability to forecast a SSE on Italian territory after a rst strong earthquake that has a magnitude value equal or larger than a xed threshold M th . In the following, we refer to the latter event as the First Strong ).…”

“…First versions of the algorithm have been successfully applied to seismicity in California and Italy . Recently, a new and online released version of NESTORE (NESTOREv1.0) was made available on GitHub (Gentili et al 2023).…”

“…In the last few years, the machine learning-based algorithm NESTORE (Next STrOng Related Earthquake) , Anyfadi et al 2023] was proposed and used to forecast clusters in which the mainshock is followed by a SSE of similar magnitude. Recently, a rst new version of a MATLAB package based on this algorithm (NESTOREv1.0) has been developed to improve SSE forecasting for research purpose and on-line sharing (Gentili et al 2023). In our analysis, we considered both a nationwide and a regional approach for Italy, by studying the seismicity recorded over the last 40 years in two areas covering most of the Italian territory and northeastern Italy, respectively.…”

Seismic clusters and fluids diffusion: a lesson from the 2018 Molise (Southern Italy) earthquake sequence

“…The cluster anomaly was first detected during the application of NESTOREv1.0 program (Gentili et al, 2023) to the whole Italian territory (Brondi et al, 2023(Brondi et al, , 2024.…”

“…The software uses the Next STrOng Related Earthquake (NESTORE) algorithm (Gentili et al, 2023), a machine-learning algorithm for cluster classification, whose aim is to forecast the probability of a strong aftershock with a magnitude (Ma) greater or equal to the magnitude of the mainshock (Mm) minus 1. While the testing of NESTOREv1.0 generally provided reliable results (86% of correct classifications), showing the coherence of the seismic behavior of the Italian clusters, the retrospective test of NESTOREv1.0 led to a failure in forecasting a strong aftershock for the 2018 Molise sequence.…”