Stochastic Declustering of Space-Time Earthquake Occurrences

AbstractThis article is concerned with objective estimation of the spatial intensity function of the background earthquake occurrences from an earthquake catalog that includes numerous clustered events in space and time, and also with an algorithm for producing declustered catalogs from the original catalog. A space-time branching process model (the ETAS model) is used for describing how each event generates offspring events. It is shown that the background intensity function can be evaluated if the total spatial seismicity intensity and the branching structure can be estimated. In fact, the whole space-time process is split into two subprocesses, the background events and the clustered events. The proposed…