Spatiotemporally explicit earthquake prediction using deep neural network

Due to the complexity of predicting future earthquakes, machine learning algorithms have been used by several researchers to increase the Accuracy of the forecast. However, the concentration of previous studies has chiefly been on the temporal rather than spatial parameters. Additionally, the less correlated variables were typically eliminated in the feature analysis and did not enter the model. This study introduces and investigates the effect of spatial parameters on four ML algorithms' performance for predicting the magnitude of future earthquakes in Iran as one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world. We compared the performances of conventional methods of Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), and a Shallow Neural Network (SNN) with the contemporary Deep Neural Network (DNN) method for predicting the magnitude of the biggest upcoming earthquake in the next week. Information Gain analysis, Accuracy, Sensitivity, Positive Predictive Value, Negative Predictive Value, and Specificity measures were exploited to investigate the outcome of using a new parameter, called Fault Density, calculated using Kernel Density Estimation and Bivariate Moran's I, on the performance of the earthquake prediction, in comparison to other commonly used parameters. We discussed the behavior of the four models while dealing with different combinations of parameters and different classes of earthquake magnitudes. The results showed promising performance of the proposed parameter for the earthquakes of high magnitudes, especially using SVM and DNN models.