Neural mixture model association of seismic phases

Abstract

Seismic phase association is the task of grouping phase arrival picks across a seismic network into subsets with common origins. Building on recent successes in this area with machine learning tools, we introduce a neural mixture model association algorithm (Neuma), which incorporates physics-informed neural networks and mixture models to address this challenging problem. Our formulation assumes explicitly that a dataset contains real phase picks from earthquakes and noise picks resulting from phase picking mistakes and fake picks. The problem statement is then to assign each observation to either an earthquake or noise. We iteratively update a set of hypocenters and magnitudes while determining the optimal class assignment for each pick. We show that by using a physics-informed Eikonal solver as the forward model, we can impose stringent quality control on surviving picks while maintaining high recall. We evaluate the performance of Neuma against several baseline algorithms on a series of challenging synthetic datasets and the 2019 Ridgecrest, California sequence. Neuma outperforms the baselines in precision and recall for each of the synthetic datasets. Furthermore, it detects an additional 3285 more earthquakes than the best baseline on the Ridgecrest dataset (13.5%), while substantially improving the hypocenters.