Earthquake Detection Using Stacked Normalized Recurrent Neural Network (SNRNN)

Earthquakes threaten people, homes, and infrastructure. Earthquake detection is a complex task because it does not show any specific pattern, unlike object detection from images. Convolutional neural networks have been widely used for earthquake detection but have problems like vanishing gradients, exploding, and parameter optimization. The ensemble learning approach combines multiple models, each of which attempts to compensate for the shortcomings of the others to enhance performance. This article proposes an ensemble learning model based on a stacked normalized recurrent neural network (SNRNN) for earthquake detection. The proposed model uses three recurrent neural network models (RNN, GRU, and LSTM) with batch normalization and layer normalization. After preprocessing the waveform data, the RNN, GRU, and LSTM extract the feature map sequentially. Batch normalization and layer normalization methods take place in mini-batches and input layers for stable and faster training of the model and improving its performance. We trained and tested the proposed model on 6574 events from 2000 to 2018 (18 years) in Turkey, a highly targeted region. The SNRNN achieves RMSE values of 3.16 and 3.24 for magnitude and depth detection. The SNRNN model outperforms the three baseline models, as seen by their low RMSE values.