Maximum-probability
or Monte-Carlo classification?
As explained in the
accompanying paper, we always compare each actual shallow earthquake to all of
the plate boundary steps on Earth, one by one, and compute the relative probability
that the earthquake was actually caused by that step. These relative probabilities can be used in
two different ways, resulting in subtly different sets of seismic subcatalogs:
Maximum-probability
subcatalog set. The earthquake is
assigned to the plate boundary step with the greatest relative
probability. This results in a single
"best-estimate" set of subcatalogs.
Note that log-cumulative-number
vs. magnitude plots are included along this branch.
Monte-Carlo subcatalog sets. The relative probabilities for all the
plate-boundary steps are summed for each of the 7 plate-boundary types. Then, a random number generator is used to
assign the earthquake to one of these plate boundary types, with relative
probability according to the proportions of the sums. The result is non-unique because it depends
on the random number generator and its initialization. We include 5 alternative realizations, as 5
sets of Monte-Carlo subcatalogs.
(Fortunately, we found that
most results of our study are