Earthquake Forecast as a Machine Learning Problem for Imbalanced Datasets: Example of Georgia, Caucasus

Abstract

In this article, we considered the problem of M≥3 earthquake (EQ) forecasting (hindcasting) using a machine learning (ML) approach, using experimental (training) time series on monitoring water-level variations in deep wells as well as geomagnetic and tidal time series in Georgia (Caucasus). For such magnitudes’, the number of “seismic” to “aseismic” days in Georgia is approximately 1:5 and the dataset is close to the balanced one. However, the problem of forecast is practically important for stronger events—say, events of M≥3.5—which means that the learning dataset of Georgia became more imbalanced: the ratio of seismic to aseismic days for in Georgia reaches the values of the order of 1:20 and more. In this case, some accepted ML classification measures, such as accuracy leads to wrong predictions due to a large number of true negative cases. As a result, the minority class, here—seismically active periods—is ignored at all. We applied specific measures to avoid the imbalance effect and exclude the overfitting possibility. After regularization (balancing) of the training data, we build the confusion matrix and performed receiver operating classification in order to forecast the next day probability of M≥3.5  earthquake occurrence. We found that the Matthews’ correlation coefficient (MCC) is the measure, which gives good results even if the negative and positive classes are of very different sizes. Application of MCC to observed geophysical data gives a good forecast of the next day M≥3.5 seismic event probability of the order of 0.8. After randomization of EQ dates in the training dataset, the Matthews’ coefficient efficiency decreases to 0.17.