Clustering earthquake signals and background noises in continuous seismic data with unsupervised deep learning

Abstract The continuously growing amount of seismic data collected worldwide is outpacing our abilities for analysis, since to date, such datasets have been analyzed in a human-expert-intensive, supervised fashion. Moreover, analyses that are conducted can be strongly biased by the standard models e...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature Communications
Main Authors: Seydoux, Léonard, Balestriero, Randall, Poli, Piero, Hoop, Maarten de, Campillo, Michel, Baraniuk, Richard
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Springer Science and Business Media LLC 2020
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Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17841-x
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17841-x.pdf
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17841-x
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Summary:Abstract The continuously growing amount of seismic data collected worldwide is outpacing our abilities for analysis, since to date, such datasets have been analyzed in a human-expert-intensive, supervised fashion. Moreover, analyses that are conducted can be strongly biased by the standard models employed by seismologists. In response to both of these challenges, we develop a new unsupervised machine learning framework for detecting and clustering seismic signals in continuous seismic records. Our approach combines a deep scattering network and a Gaussian mixture model to cluster seismic signal segments and detect novel structures. To illustrate the power of the framework, we analyze seismic data acquired during the June 2017 Nuugaatsiaq, Greenland landslide. We demonstrate the blind detection and recovery of the repeating precursory seismicity that was recorded before the main landslide rupture, which suggests that our approach could lead to more informative forecasting of the seismic activity in seismogenic areas.