Systematic Global Testing of Intermediate-Term Earthquake Prediction Algorithms

Abstract

The systematic testing of intermediate-term earthquake prediction algorithms is faced with the difficulties of (1) the limited time spanned by instrumental catalogs of seismicity in most areas of the world, and (2) the relative arbitrariness of the selection of the region and time interval over which to apply the algorithm. We offer a systematic method which uses worldwide seismicity to compute the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve of such an algorithm and permits a quantitative test of the null hypothesis that the algorithm samples space time no better than a random process with uniform probability distribution. We use the "M8" algorithm as an example. Introduction The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve for an arbitrary detector is simply a plot of a measure of success of the detector in terms of the fraction of signals correctly detected, as a function of the volume of parametric space in which a signal is claimed to exist. For a prediction algorithm ..