Evaluation of seismogenesis behavior in Himalayan belt using data mining tools for forecasting

Abstract

In the proposed study, non-linear behavioral patterns in the seismic regime for earthquakes in the Himalayan basin have been studied using a complete, verified EQ catalogue comprised of all major events and their aftershock sequences in the Himalayan basin for the past 110 years [1900–2010]. The dataset has been analyzed to give better decision making criteria for impending earthquakes. A series of statistical tests based on multi-dimensional rigorous statistical studies, inter-event distance analyses, and statistical time analyses have been used to obtain correlation dimensions. The time intervals of earthquakes within a seismic regime have been used to train the neural network to analyze the nature of earthquake patterns in the different clusters. The results obtained from descriptive statistics show high correlation with previously conducted gravity studies and radon anomaly variation. A study of the time of recurrence of the numerical properties of the regime for 60 years from 1950 to 2010 for the Himalayan belt for analysis of significant EQ failure events has been done to find the best fit for an empirical data probability distribution. The distribution of waiting time of swarm events occurring in the Himalayan basin follows a power-law model, while independent events do not fit the power-law distribution. This suggests that probability of the occurrence of swarm events [M ⩽ 6.0] with frequent shaking may be more frequent than that of the occurrence of independent events of magnitude [M >6.0] in the Himalayan belt. We propose a three-layer feed forward neural network model to identify factors, with the actual occurrence of the maximum earthquake level M as input and target vectors in Himalayan basin area. We infer through a series of statistical results and evaluations that probabilistic forecasting of earthquakes can be achieved by finding the meta-stable cluster zones of the Himalayan clusters for the spatio-temporal distribution of earthquakes in the area.