Application of XGBoost model for early prediction of earthquake magnitude from waveform data

In this paper, a scalable end-to-end tree boosting system called XGBoost has been applied for predicting the magnitude of an earthquake from the early part of earthquake waveform data. This model uses the features extracted from the early P wave phase of the records as an input. The model's effectiveness has been verified by using data on earthquakes occurring in the Eurasian plate of Japan Islands from 1996 to 2021. Feature engineering has given 29 new features identified from the early P wave phase of the record, which show a high correlation with the magnitude of an earthquake. The comparison of predicted and actual magnitude shows that a trained XGboost model, which uses a single input record for magnitude prediction, gives an average prediction error of 0.004 +/- 0.57 for earthquakes in the test dataset. In contrast, the average prediction error of -1.1 +/- 0.80 and -0.65 +/- 0.69 has been obtained for the magnitude estimated from conventional tau c and Pd methods using the same test dataset. It is further seen that the average predicted magnitude of a single earthquake of magnitude 4.5 and 6.1 (MJMA) obtained by using multiple nearfield records using XGBoost model is 4.58 +/- 0.33 and 6.32 +/- 0.29, which is close to the actual magnitude of the earthquake. The results presented in this paper clearly show that the structured data can be effectively used by complex machine learning or deep learning models to predict earthquake magnitude from single or multiple records.