Machine-learning competition boosts earthquake prediction capabilities

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 18, 2019--Three teams who applied novel machine learning methods to successfully predict the timing of earthquakes from historic seismic data are splitting $50,000 in prize money from an open, online Kaggle competition hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory and its partners. "Crowdsourcing for new approaches in earthquake forecasting helps us leverage a wide range of expertise in addressing one of the most important problems in Earth science, because of the devastating consequences of large quakes," said Bertrand Rouet-Leduc, a Los Alamos researcher who prepared the data for the competition. "The winning teams' results could have the potential to improve earthquake hazard assessments that could save lives and billions of dollars in infrastructure." Current scientific studies related to earthquake forecasting focus on three key points: when the event will occur, where it will occur, and how large it will be. The Kaggle competition provided a challenging dataset that was based on previously published laboratory analysis, to give the competitors a taxing project to explore.