Regional Seismic Information Entropy for Detecting Precursors of Earthquake Activation

Here a method is presented for detecting precursors of earthquakes from time series data on earthquakes in a target region. Regional Entropy of Seismic Information, a quantity representing the average influence of an earthquake in the target region to the diversity of clusters to which earthquakes distribute, is introduced. Based on a rough qualitative model of the dynamics of land crust, it is hypothesized that the saturation after the increase in the Regional Entropy of Seismic Information precedes the activation of earthquakes. On the open earthquake catalog, this hypothesis is validated. This temporal change turned out to correlate more with the activation of earthquakes in Japanese regions, by one to two years precedence, than the compared baseline methods.