Information Theory to Characterize Spatiotemporal Patterns of Seismicity in the Kanto Region

by A. Posadas, T. Hirata, and F. Vidal

Abstract

This article proposes a quantitative method to characterize the spatiotemporal evolution of the seismic activity of a region for a given time interval. The technique is based on the fact that the model whose parameters maximize the mutual information is the best model. These parameters can provide a probabilistic characterization of the evolution of the earthquakes of a region in space and time. To do this, it is necessary to establish a propagation model (cross template [CT] model in this article) and reasonable criteria to decide when an area (whose size β will be found by the model) is considered seismically activated in a period of time τ (whose value is also the result of the application of the method). The results found with the CT model are highly satisfactory and show that our model is a powerful tool to quantitatively characterize spatiotemporal seismic patterns.

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