Applying Machine Learning to Crowd-sourced Data from Earthquake Detective

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how machine learning, combined with citizen science data, can effectively detect weak seismic signals from small earthquakes and tremor, addressing challenges of noise and limited training data.

Contribution

It introduces a new crowd-sourced dataset for PDT seismic events and shows ML's capability to detect signals from tremor, a novel achievement.

Findings

ML detects signals from small earthquakes.

ML successfully detects PDT tremor signals.

Citizen science data enhances seismic signal classification.

Abstract

Dynamically triggered earthquakes and tremor generate two classes of weak seismic signals whose detection, identification, and authentication traditionally call for laborious analyses. Machine learning (ML) has grown in recent years to be a powerful efficiency-boosting tool in geophysical analyses, including the detection of specific signals in time series. However, detecting weak signals that are buried in noise challenges ML algorithms, in part because ubiquitous training data is not always available. Under these circumstances, ML can be as ineffective as human experts are inefficient. At this intersection of effectiveness and efficiency, we leverage a third tool that has grown in popularity over the past decade: Citizen science. Citizen science project Earthquake Detective leverages the eyes and ears of volunteers to detect and classify weak signals in seismograms from potentially dynamically triggered (PDT) events. Here, we present the Earthquake Detective data set - A crowd-sourced set of labels on PDT earthquakes and tremor. We apply Machine Learning to classify these PDT seismic events and explore the challenges faced in segregating and classifying such weak signals. We confirm that with an image- and wavelet-based algorithm, machine learning can detect signals from small earthquakes. In addition, we report that our ML algorithm can also detect signals from PDT tremor, which has not been previously demonstrated. The citizen science data set of classifications and ML code are available online.