Predicting Earthquakes with Machine Learning

Broad idea has been around for years.  Are we getting closer?  Gets heavily into accuracy and risk of different kinds of errors here.    We worked with them on machine failure analysis and prediction, which has some similar profiles of failure.

Machine-learning earthquake prediction in lab shows promise  LANL press release. 

A computer science approach using machine learning can predict the time remaining before the fault fails   Listening to faultline’s grumbling gives countdown to future quakes

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Aug. 30, 2017—By listening to the acoustic signal emitted by a laboratory-created earthquake, a computer science approach using machine learning can predict the time remaining before the fault fails.

“At any given instant, the noise coming from the lab fault zone provides quantitative information on when the fault will slip,” said Paul Johnson, a Los Alamos National Laboratory fellow and lead investigator on the research, which was published today in Geophysical Research Letters.

“The novelty of our work is the use of machine learning to discover and understand new physics of failure, through examination of the recorded auditory signal from the experimental setup. I think the future of earthquake physics will rely heavily on machine learning to process massive amounts of raw seismic data. Our work represents an important step in this direction,” he said.

Not only does the work have potential significance to earthquake forecasting, Johnson said, but the approach is far-reaching, applicable to potentially all failure scenarios including nondestructive testing of industrial materials brittle failure of all kinds, avalanches and other events.

Machine learning is an artificial intelligence approach to allowing the computer to learn from new data, updating its own results to reflect the implications of new information.

The machine learning technique used in this project also identifies new signals, previously thought to be low-amplitude noise, that provide forecasting inform with slow earthquakes on tectonic faults in the lower crust,” Johnson said. “There is reason to expect such signals from Earth faults in the seismogenic zone for slowly slipping faults.” ....  

Machine learning algorithms can predict failure times of laboratory quakes with remarkable accuracy. The acoustic emission (AE) signal, which characterizes the instantaneous physical state of the system, reliably predicts failure far into the future. This is a surprise, Johnson pointed out, as all prior work had assumed that only the catalog of large events is relevant, and that small fluctuations in the AE signal could be neglected.  .... "