SEMINARI

Venerdi 19 Dicembre 2014

Sala Pentagonale, secondo piano

Via Bassini 15 Milano

ore 14:30

PhD Ting Wang

Modelling of seismic activity using Markov-modulated Hawkes process and its extensions

Earthquakes are processes in which the internal workings are only observed indirectly, although the final effects are all too observable! Hidden Markov models (HMMs, a general statistical framework for modelling partially observed systems) are an intuitively attractive idea for analysing seismicity.
I will introduce the Markov-modulated Hawkes process that we developed for investigating long-term patterns in seismicity rate. The catalogue of the Landers earthquake sequence, which included multiple mainshocks, was used as a case study. I will show how this model captures the cyclic parent-generating-offspring feature of the temporal behaviour of earthquakes. I will also discuss our current work on extending this temporal model by including spatial variation of the seismic activity and the earthquake magnitude. Our aim is to categorize spatiotemporal seismic hazards holistically, using the entire earthquake record in a selected region to identify patterns correlated with subsequent large earthquakes, rather than the traditional way of hunting for individual foreshocks.