A deep Gaussian process model for seismicity background rates

Abstract

The spatio-temporal properties of seismicity give us incisive insight into the stress state evolution and fault structures of the crust. Empirical models based on self-exciting point processes continue to provide an important tool for analysing seismicity, given the epistemic uncertainty associated with physical models. In particular, the epidemic-type aftershock sequence (ETAS) model acts as a reference model for studying seismicity catalogues. The traditional ETAS model uses simple parametric definitions for the background rate of triggering-independent seismicity. This reduces the effectiveness of the basic ETAS model in modelling the temporally complex seismicity patterns seen in seismic swarms that are dominated by aseismic tectonic processes such as fluid injection rather than aftershock triggering. In order to robustly capture time-varying seismicity rates, we introduce a deep Gaussian process (GP) formulation for the background rate as an extension to ETAS. GPs are a robust non-parametric model for function spaces with covariance structure. By conditioning the length-scale structure of a GP with another GP, we have a deep-GP: a probabilistic, hierarchical model that automatically tunes its structure to match data constraints. We show how the deep-GP-ETAS model can be efficiently sampled by making use of a Metropolis-within-Gibbs scheme, taking advantage of the branching process formulation of ETAS and a stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) approximation for MatCrossed D sign