Assessing Seismic Hazard in Chile Using Deep Neural Networks

Earthquakes represent one of the most destructive yet unpredictable natural disasters around the world, with a massive physical, psychological, and economical impact in the population. Earthquake events are, in some cases, explained by some empirical laws such as Omori’s law, Bath’s law, and Gutenberg-Richter’s law. However, there is much to be studied yet; due to the high complexity associated with the process, nonlinear correlations among earthquake occurrences and also their occurrence depend on a multitude of variables that in most cases are yet unidentified. Therefore, having a better understanding on occurrence of each seismic event, and estimating the seismic hazard risk, would represent an invaluable tool for improving earthquake prediction. In that sense, this work consists in the implementation of a machine learning approach for assessing the earthquake risk in Chile, using information from 2012 to 2018. The results show a good performance of the deep neural network models for predicting future earthquake events.