The integrated particle filter method: an approximate Bayesian earthquake early warning system

Stephen Wu

Institute of Statistical Mathematics

Date & Time
Location
Building 3, Rambo Auditorium
Host
Sarah Minson
Summary

Motivated by the many false alarms during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake sequence in Japan, we developed a probabilistic approach to handle multiple concurrent earthquakes in earthquake early warning (EEW) system, called the integrated particle filter (IPF) method. We formulated a likelihood model that exploits information of both triggered and not yet triggered seismic stations, as well as the spatial distribution of seismic stations. A particle filter approach is used to perform real-time updating of the probabilistic estimations of source parameters, and the prediction uncertainty obtained in our model is used in an approximate Bayesian model class selection algorithm to estimate the number of concurrent events. Our algorithm results in over 90 per cent reduction in the number of incorrect warnings compared to the existing EEW system operating in Japan, and have shown good performance in places that do not have a dense seismic network.

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