Laboratory earthquake forecasting: A machine learning competition
Earthquake prediction, the long-sought holy grail of earthquake science, continues to confound Earth scientists. Could we make advances by crowdsourcing, drawing from the vast knowledge and creativity of the machine learning (ML) community? We used Google's ML competition platform, Kaggle, to e...
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Published in | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 118; no. 5 |
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Main Authors | , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
United States
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
02.02.2021
National Academy of Sciences |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Earthquake prediction, the long-sought holy grail of earthquake science, continues to confound Earth scientists. Could we make advances by crowdsourcing, drawing from the vast knowledge and creativity of the machine learning (ML) community? We used Google's ML competition platform, Kaggle, to engage the worldwide ML community with a competition to develop and improve data analysis approaches on a forecasting problem that uses laboratory earthquake data. The competitors were tasked with predicting the time remaining before the next earthquake of successive laboratory quake events, based on only a small portion of the laboratory seismic data. The more than 4,500 participating teams created and shared more than 400 computer programs in openly accessible notebooks. Complementing the now well-known features of seismic data that map to fault criticality in the laboratory, the winning teams employed unexpected strategies based on rescaling failure times as a fraction of the seismic cycle and comparing input distribution of training and testing data. In addition to yielding scientific insights into fault processes in the laboratory and their relation with the evolution of the statistical properties of the associated seismic data, the competition serves as a pedagogical tool for teaching ML in geophysics. The approach may provide a model for other competitions in geosciences or other domains of study to help engage the ML community on problems of significance. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 9233218CNA000001; FG02-09ER16022; SC0020445; SC0020512; EE0008763; 20200278ER; 89233218CNA000001 USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES) LA-UR-20-28829; LA-UR-20-26035 USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES). Chemical Sciences, Geosciences & Biosciences Division 1P.A.J., B.R.-L., and L.J.P-N. contributed equally to this work. 3Member of Team Zoo, a team formed to compete in the Kaggle earthquake competition. Edited by David A. Weitz, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved November 28, 2020 (received for review August 3, 2020) Author contributions: P.A.J., L.J.P.-N., G.C.B., A.H., and W.R. designed research; B.R.-L., C.J.M., P.S., D.G., D.K., C.J.L., P.P., and K.M.P. performed research; P.A.J., C.H., P.S., D.G., D.K., C.J.L., P.P., and K.M.P. analyzed data; and P.A.J., B.R.-L. and L.J.P.-N. wrote the paper. |
ISSN: | 0027-8424 1091-6490 |
DOI: | 10.1073/pnas.2011362118 |