Unsupervised Probabilistic Machine Learning Applied to Seismicity Declustering: a New Approach to Represent Earthquake Catalogues with Fewer Assumptions

Many applications in seismology require to isolate earthquake clusters from a background activity. Relative declustering methods essentially find a 2D representation of an earthquake catalogue that distinguishes between two classes of events: crisis and non-crisis events. However, the number of statistical and/or physical parameters to be used is often limited due to the difficulty of concatenating the information onto a physically meaningful 2D grid. In this study, we propose to alleviate the declustering task by using the ability of unsupervised artificial intelligence to model complex spatio-temporal relationships directly from data. Through a data-driven approach, we define an easily transferable declustering model that provides declustering results with fewer assumptions and no prior selection of thresholds. We first obtain this model by training a self-organising neural network (SOM) that learns to cluster data points according to their feature similarity on a 2D map. We then assign each SOM cluster a label (crisis or non-crisis class) using an agglomerative clustering procedure. We quantify the classification uncertainty by developing a probabilistic function based on the projection learned by SOM. Our method is applied to a synthetic dataset and to real catalogues from the Gulf of Corinth, Central Italy and Taiwan. We discuss the validity of the method by estimating its classification accuracy. For real data, we qualitatively compare our results to previous declustering attempts. We show that our approach is easy to handle, provides a fairly new representation of earthquake catalogues and has the potential to reduce classification ambiguities between nearby events.