Machine learning approaches to seismic event classification in the Ostrava region

Abstract

The northeastern region of the Czech Republic is among the most seismically active areas in the country. The most frequent seismic events are mining-induced since there used to be strong mining activity in the past. However, natural tectonic events may also occur. In addition, seismic stations often record explosions in quarries in the region. Despite the cessation of mining activities, mine-induced seismic events still occur. Therefore, a rapid differentiation between tectonic and anthropogenic events is still important. The region is currently monitored by the OKC seismic station in Ostrava-Krásné Pole built in 1983 which is a part of the Czech Regional Seismic Network. The station has been providing digital continuous waveform data at 100 Hz since 2007. In the years 1992--2002, the region was co-monitored by the Seismic Polygon Frenštát (SPF) which consisted of five seismic stations using a triggered STA/LTA system. In this study, we apply and compare machine learning methods to the SPF dataset, which contains labeled records of tectonic and mining-induced events. For binary classification, a Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural network and XGBoost achieved an F1-score of 0.94 -- 0.95, demonstrating the potential of modern machine learning techniques for rapid event characterization.