The Bayesian Approach to Association
Abstract
The Bayesian approach to Association focuses mainly on quantifying the physics of the domain. In the case of seismic association for instance let
X be the set of all significant events (above some threshold) and their attributes, such as location, time, and magnitude, Y1 be the set of detections that are caused by significant events and their attributes such as seismic phase, arrival time, amplitude etc., Y2 be the set of detections that are not caused by significant events, and finally Y be the set of observed detections We would now define the joint distribution P(X, Y1, Y2, Y) = P(X) P(Y1 | X) P(Y2) I(Y = Y1 + Y2) ; where the last term simply states that Y1 and Y2 are a partitioning of Y. Given the above joint distribution the inference problem is simply to find the X, Y1, and Y2 that maximizes posterior probability P(X, Y1, Y2| Y) which reduces to maximizing P(X) P(Y1 | X) P(Y2) I(Y = Y1 + Y2). In this expression P(X) captures our prior belief about event locations. P(Y1 | X) captures notions of travel time, residual error distributions as well as detection and mis-detection probabilities. While P(Y2) captures the false detection rate of our seismic network. The elegance of this approach is that all of the assumptions are stated clearly in the model for P(X), P(Y1|X) and P(Y2). The implementation of the inference is merely a by-product of this model. In contrast some of the other methods such as GA hide a number of assumptions in the implementation details of the inference - such as the so called "driver cells." The other important aspect of this approach is that all seismic knowledge including knowledge from other domains such as infrasound and hydroacoustic can be included in the same model. So, we don't need to separately account for misdetections or merge seismic and infrasound events as a separate step. Finally, it should be noted that the objective of automatic association is to simplify the job of humans who are publishing seismic bulletins based on this output. The error metric for association should accordingly count errors such as missed events much higher than spurious events because the former require more work from humans. Furthermore, the error rate needs to be weighted higher during periods of high seismicity such as an aftershock sequence when the human effort tends to increase.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.S23D..07A
- Keywords:
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- 7219 Seismic monitoring and test-ban treaty verification;
- SEISMOLOGY;
- 7294 Seismic instruments and networks;
- SEISMOLOGY