ISSN 0941-0643, Volume 19, Number 7

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Neural Comput & Applic (2010) 19:10811087 DOI 10.1007/s00521-010-0373-9

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE

A Chilean seismic regionalization through a Kohonen neural network

Jorge Reyes Vctor H. Cardenas

Received: 25 March 2009 / Accepted: 21 April 2010 / Published online: 11 May 2010 Springer-Verlag London Limited 2010

Abstract Through this paper we are presenting a study of seismic regionalization for continental Chile based on a neural network. A scenario with six seismic regions is obtained, irrespective of the size of the neighborhood or the range of the correlation between the cells of the grid. Unlike conventional seismic methods, our work manages to generate seismic regions tectonically valid from sparse and non-redundant information, which shows that the selforganizing maps are a valuable tool in seismology. The high correlation between the spatial distribution of the seismic zones and geological data conrms that the elds chosen for structuring the training vectors were the most appropriate. Keywords Seismic regionalization Earthquake hazard Seismic risk Neural network Kohonen self-organizing map

1 Introduction The idea of a spatial classication of seismic sources can be traced back to 1941 when Gorshkov [1] published one of the rst studies on seismic regionalization for the USSR. Based on these earlier studies, Richter [2], in a paper

J. Reyes TGT, San Renato 217, Los Andes, Chile e-mail: daneel@geosica.cl V. H. Cardenas (&) Departamento de Fsica y Astronoma, Universidad de Valparaso, Av. Gran Bretana 1111, Valparaso, Chile e-mail: victor@dfa.uv.cl

entitled Seismic regionalization, founded the basis of a methodology that allows to have information dealing with preventing the potential damage that an earthquake may cause through the denition of hazard zones. In a seismic country like Chile, and based on the urgent goals established by Richter, a proper regionalization map is desirable in order to quantify the seismic risk. Attempts to ll the gap in these matters have been made from time to time. In [3] is found the earliest regionalization study for Chile where the authors Gajardo and Lomnitz used the same methods of seismic correlation that Tsuboi used in the case of Japan. Later works on this subject were mainly focused on engineering aspects as Walkner [4], Labbe [5] and Barrientos [6], discussed about seismic risk. Essentially, these studies used the technique proposed by Cornell [7] and Algermissen and Perkings [8]. A more recent study was made by Martin [9], where the author applied the Gutenberg-Richter law [10] to divide Chile into a total of nine seismic regions. In this paper, we implement a Kohonen neural network [11] (from here on NN) to determine the seismic zones. In general, a Neural Network can be dened as a computing system made up of a number of simple, highly interconnected processing elements, which processes information by their dynamic state response to external inputs [12]. NNs are typically organized into layers. Layers are made up of a number of interconnected nodes which contain an activation function. Patterns are presented to the network via the input layer, which communicates one or more hidden layers where the actual processing is done through a system of weighted connections. The hidden layers then link to an output layer where the answer is output. Most NNs contain certain types of learning rule which modify the weights of the connections according to the input patterns they are exposed to.

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In this paper, we use a special NN appropriate to discriminate spatial distribution. A Kohonen NN (or as it is usually called a self-organizing map) is an articial neural network that is trained using unsupervised learning to produce a low-dimensional (typically two dimensional), discretized representation of the input space of the training samples, called a map. The network must be fed by a large number of example vectors that represent, as close as possible, the kinds of vectors expected during mapping. The examples are usually provided several times. In this way, the NN nds by itself the best distribution of zones, based on the training vectors, without using more information than the characteristic of seismic sources. This work is organized as follows. The next section revises related works on seismic regionalization. Then in Sects. 3 to 5, we explain the neural procedure used. Section 6 is devoted to the analysis of the results and we nish the paper with conclusions.

2 Related works The conventional method for seismic regionalization divides the zones according to the frequency of seismic events and also to a critical review of the structural and tectonic setting of the area [13, 14]. We wonder about the possibility of the existence of correlated information and/or redundant, and that some Articial Intelligence system was able to organize. For example, it is clear that a high seismicity should generate signicant discontinuities in the Earths surface. However, no known method of Seismic Regionalization uses Neural Networks to identify such correlations. We show that a Kohonen neural network is a valuable tool for the Earthquake Engineering, because from a small set of specially chosen input elds, it is able to regionalize a wide area in a reliable manner, generating areas with an acceptable internal correlation coefcient and also achieving to deduce certain relevant geographic features from the unique information of the seismic sources. In the case of Chile, the author Martin [9] used a longitudinal division criteria for the country based on the line that separates the deep and supercial earthquakes, which is derived from the high degree of coupling between the Nazca and South American plates. This criterion enables him to identify two macro-zones in the continental zone: On the coast, with hypocenters with depths lesser than 40 km, and the mountain macro-zone. As a criterion for latitudinal division, Martin computed the b parameter of the Gutenberg-Richter law for an initial surface, and then he varied the surface iteratively. If b changes dramatically, it means that a seismic zone has been crossed. These are the nine regions Martin found: on the coast; three zones. In

the deep mountain zone, he distinguished four zones. In the mountain surface zone, he distinguished a single zone. Finally, the method determined the aseismic zone of Magallanes. In the context of seismic hazard or seismic risk, there have been many attempts to use this technique. For example, in [15] the authors used articial NN to discriminate between earthquakes and underground nuclear explosions. Also for seismic detection [16, 17], in which the NN is trained to recognize signal patterns, and also for earthquake prediction [18]. It is important to notice that in 2009, Kerh et al. proposed a method that combines Genetic Algorithm with Neural Computing that allows them to estimate the peak ground acceleration at seven metropolitan areas in Taiwan [19]. In this case, the Articial Intelligence method used, allowed to identify potentially hazardous areas. The aforementioned paper made clear the main utility of any method capable of characterizing the seismicity. The fact of grouping seismic zones according to their seismicity is always associated with different levels of hazard, which will directly inuence the construction standards of housing, bridges and tunnels [20, 21, 22]. However, the regionalization criteria are subjective, since the structural and tectonic features are not translatable into rigorous numerical values. Likewise, the criteria for classication of earthquakes (deep vs. surface, weak vs. strong, etc.) are also subjective. In this paper, we investigate the possibility that a neural network unsupervised nds, in a natural way, the seismic regions without having to resort to arbitrary rules.

3 Election of an AI system In a Supervised Neural Network, we are required to present a series of input vectors with their respective outputs. In our case, the output vectors should be related directly or indirectly with seismic regions, which require having some prior knowledge of them. However, what we seek in this work is to nd the seismic regions in a natural way, i.e. without resorting to vector output based on previous models for regionalization. This led us to discard Supervised Neural Networks. Moreover, the Fuzzy Inference Systems appear appropriate for classication tasks, given that mimic human-like reasoning style when input values are analog. These systems require linguistic models consisting of a set of IF-THEN fuzzy rules. For example: IF (depth is shallow and seismicity is high) THEN (region is hazardous). We discarded the use of these systems, because they require the use of membership functions depending on the position (in accordance with Sect. 4, it could reach up to

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156 have different membership functions). For example, in Santiago de Chile, an earthquake of magnitude 6.8 Mw causes no damage and many people would consider it a strong tremor, while in Punitaqui (Northern Chile) the same quake is considered an earthquake, causing great destruction (the aforementioned earthquake occurred on 14 October 1997). Moreover, the criteria that classify earthquakes between supercial or deep ones, seems to be very dependent on the underground conguration of tectonic plates, up to the point that in some places deep could mean that the hypocenter is greater than 20 km, while in other places it may mean that the hypocenter is greater than 200 km. Therefore, a Seismic Regionalization based on Fuzzy Inference Systems turns out to be extremely dependent on the membership functions and it is this level of arbitrariness precisely what we want to avoid. Unsupervised Neural Networks are capable of clustering input vectors in a natural way and starting from the obvious criterium of orthogonality or disjunction between the vectors that accurately characterize each sector. In this case, the difculty lies in choosing the proper set of elds able to represent each cell of the grid. Moreover, the fact of the existence of correlated information and/or redundant (as seismicity and geographic accidents), can be easily studied observing the effect of the structure of the input vectors on the grid classication. All this led us to decide that the right choice was to begin with a study on the effectiveness of a Kohonen Neural Network applied to Seismic Regionalization.

The area covered by our data set is Chiles continental territory included inside a rectangle dened around the meridian 72 W as the northsouth axis, between the parallels 17 S and 56 S (see the gures for details). The interval of fty years ensures us to have a very representative set of data. It is long enough to have earthquake frequency histograms with representative information which could be projected to a larger period of time. 4.2 The Kohonen training vectors In order to classify the zones, we divided the area selected in the previous section by 156 rectangular cells of 1 9 1. Each cell was characterized by a seven dimensional vector, indicating the observed historical seismicity between 1957 and 2007. The 7D vector is explained below with more details: x 1: x 2: x 3: x 4: x 5: x 6: x 7: Mean deep of the seismic sources Number of earthquakes with magnitude C 4.5 Ms Number of earthquakes with magnitude C 5.5 Ms Number of earthquakes with magnitude C 6.5 Ms Maximum observed magnitude Central horizontal coordinate of the cell Central vertical coordinate of the cell

4 Training set The election of the training set is the crucial step toward the implementation of a useful NN. The usefulness of a NN depends on what we are interested in getting from it. As we have discussed in the Sect. 2, the necessity is mainly the one of a hazard categorizer in the Chilean territory. In this section, we will discuss the criteria used to construct our training set. 4.1 Database The idea was to associate the earthquake information by zone, frequency and magnitude. We expected the NN nds by itself what we call here zone, by introducing in it specic information about its seismic history. In this work, we use as a database all the earthquakes classied with Richter magnitude equal or greater than 4.5 Ms in the interval 19572007. The sources for the data we used, were obtained from the catalog CERESIS [23] and from the database of the USGS [24] (from 1973 up to the present).

These are considered the minimum number of sensitive parameters which characterize each event. It was unnecessary to use geologic information due to the fact that we found out that the NN was able to correctly deduce the ground geology starting from the seismicity (see item C in Sect. 6).

5 Training procedure The 156 vectors were introduced into the Kohonen NN, with a previous normalization of the required input data so that the value of each eld was between the interval [0,1]. To accomplish this, the expected minimum and maximum values for each of the seven elds was provided. The free parameters in the running are two: the number of iterations and the number of classes or regions. By inspection, it was observed that in all the runs, and after an average of 2,500 iterations, the NN reached to a stable conguration, which gave us a trustable value to set the number of iterations. We used the following Learning Algorithm [25]: 1. 2. 3. Each neurons weights are initialized. An input vector is chosen at random from the set of training data and presented to the network. Every neuron is examined to calculate which ones weights are most like the input vector (the winning

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node is commonly known as the Best Matching Unit). The radius of the neighborhood of the BMU is now calculated (this is a value that starts large, but diminishes each time-step). Any neurons found within this radius are deemed to be inside the BMUs neighborhood. Each neighboring neurons (the neuron found in step 4) weights are adjusted to make them more like the input vector. The closer a neuron is to the BMU, the more its weights get altered. Go to step 2 for N = 2,500 iterations.

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4.

5.

6.

In an initial training session, we forced the NN to create 5, 10 and 15 classes. In all these cases, it was observed that during the rst 1,000 iterations, the system passed through a metastable conguration with just three classes, as it is shown in Fig. 1.

That is, the application of a Kohonen neural network allowed us to determine the natural number of classes or seismic regions without resorting to the Principal Components Analysis [26], to Fuzzy Inference Systems or to seismological subjective criteria. We called these three classes the fundamental classes. Let us explain in detail each one of these. According to Fig. 1, in the northern part of the country, we distinguish two classes or two seismic zones of high seismicity, associated to the interaction between the Nazca and South American plates. In the south, we distinguish another class or seismic zone, with low seismicity, associated to the interaction among the South American, Scotia and Antarctic plates. Despite having found the optimal number of classes (three), from the point of view of Earthquake Engineering, it is necessary to have a greater level of detail (for example, it is not practical for a Mayor to manage as a unit an area of *100,000 km2). That is why we decided to double the level of detail, forcing the NN to catalog six classes or seismic regions. In this case, after 2,500 iterations, the nal result was the same, essentially independent of the initial size of the neighborhood. Figure 2 shows the nal result using SIX clusters or categories, 2,500 iterations and an initial size of the neighborhood of 5.

6 Analysis 6.1 Island regions As we can see in Fig. 3, in certain regions some discontinuities occurred, through an interruption of another region. We called these island regions. In the north part, region 6 becomes separated into two subregions; region 6A (coast) and region 6B (mountain). The north part, region 5 becomes separated into three subregions; region 5A (including Iquique), region 5B (including Copiapo) and region 5C (centered in Santiago). Although they are discontinuous regions, the Kohonen NN associates them in the same category because they presented similar seismicity. For that reason we stress to name it just regions 5 and 6. Of course, the seismicity associated to each region depends on the chosen vectors representing each cell. 6.2 Gutenberg-Richter law For each region, we found the parameters of the Gutenberg-Richter (GR) law. Here N(CM) is the mean amount of earthquakes of magnitude greater or equal than M observed in a year, in a normalized area (equivalent to a cell of 1 9 1 in the Equator). For more details, see Table 1.

Fig. 1 Metastable conguration after 1,000 iterations of the neural network. This result was obtained independent of how many classes we ask for, which allowed us to nd the fundamental classes

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Fig. 3 North and South part of Chile. Here is the division of discussed seismic zones in the text Table 1 This is a summary of the results for the parameters in the Gutenberg-Richter law Region 1 2 3 4 5 6 a 3.844 4.209 3.298 2.702 3.784 3.702 b -1.069 -0.922 -0.699 -0.520 -0.685 -0.555 v2 0.9073 0.8650 0.9373 0.9721 0.9405 0.9388 Max. Mag. (Ms) 5.5 6.9 7.7 8.3 7.1 7.8 N( C4.5) 0.11 1.15 1.42 2.30 5.02 16.03

Fig. 2 Transient stable conguration after 2,500 iterations and independent of the initial reach of the correlation (or initial size of the neighborhood). The numbers are explained in Table 1

The equation reads logN = a ? bM, where M is the magnitude in Ms units. It also is given v2 of the t and the maximum magnitude (in Ms units) for each region

6.3 Correlation with the geology There is, naturally, a causative relationship between seismic activity and the macro-shapes in the relief. The NN

was able to deduce correctly certain geological and tectonic features having seismicity as the starting point (Fig. 4). For example, the zones 5B and 5C have an interruption between latitudes 29 and 32, which coincides with a geographic accident: the intermediate Depression disappears, being replaced by the fusion between the Andes and

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Fig. 4 Correlation between the seismic regions and the geological and tectonic characteristics of Continental Chile

Coast Mountains. Then, zone 5 is strongly associated to the intermediate depression and zone 3 is strongly related to the Andes Mountains. On the other hand, the limit between the Nazca Plate and the Antarctic Plate is found around the latitude 47 S, what coincides with the decline of the seismicity as we move toward the south. It is clearly observed that the zones with a higher seismicity (5 and 6) are found in the north extreme, while the zones with lower seismicity (1 and 2) are found in the scouth extreme.

information about the number of earthquakes per range. Then, the denition of seismicity deduced from the NN must be associated to the magnitude and angular

Table 2 Here it is displayed the seismic zones under the hierarchy of a growing order according to the |b| parameter of the GutenbergRichter Law Hierarchy 1 2 3 Zone 4 6 5 3 2 1 |b| 0.520 0.555 0.685 0.699 0.922 1.069

7 Conclusions Considering the semi-logarithmic GR law slope, we obtain the hierarchy of the six regions, as it is shown in Table 2. In Table 1, and looking at the rst and last columns, we observe the hierarchy based on the seismicity of the zones. As it was explained in Sect. 4, the NN was trained with

4 5 6

NN used as input data the amount of seisms observed in the last 50 years, we assume that the nal hierarchy must be mainly based on the number of earthquakes which are equal or larger than 4.5 Ms, according to Table 1

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orientation of the 7D vectors, which strongly depends on the number of earthquakes equal or larger than 4.5 Ms. In this context, zone 1 is an aseismic zone, and zone 6 is the most seismic one. It is possible that zones 5A and 6B are parts of a larger one extending themselves toward Peru and Bolivia. In the north part of the country, the high seismicity observed can be understood as the result of the activity of the subduction between the Nazca and South American plates (at a rate of convergence of *10 cm per year, as it is well known). In the south, we obtain a low seismicity in agreement with the well known result of a convergence of the South American, Scotia and Antarctic plates, at a rate of *2 cm per year. In this work, we have demonstrated that using a Kohonen NN, and a database with exclusive information from the seismic sources, can be possible to differentiate six seismic zones for continental Chilean territory, which are supported by the geological features of the sector and internal high correlation coefcients. Some of these regions are apparently disconnected zones (we called them here island zones), but this is in fact an effect produced by considering just an arbitrary portion of territory (that of Continental Chile) in the analysis. Also the interruption between these island zones can be clearly associated with major geographical accidents, as the intermediate depression and some transverse valleys. In addition, our research did not need to resort to arbitrary criteria related to seismicity (weak versus strong seism, deep versus supercial, etc) and we discovered that the Chilean earthquake zones fall naturally into three classes, which are strongly correlated with the tectonic plates. All these facts show the power of using NN techniques in the eld of seismology.
Acknowledgments JR wants to thank TGT for the support through grant number 2122 and 2123. VHC wants to thank Rafael Valdivia for useful discussions.

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