Anomaly detection of earthquake precursor data using long short-term memory networks

Earthquake precursor data have been used as an important basis for earthquake prediction. In this study, a recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture with long short-term memory (LSTM) units is utilized to develop a predictive model for normal data. Furthermore, the prediction errors from the predictive models are used to indicate normal or abnormal behavior. An additional advantage of using the LSTM networks is that the earthquake precursor data can be directly fed into the network without any elaborate preprocessing as required by other approaches. Furthermore, no prior information on abnormal data is needed by these networks as they are trained only using normal data. Experiments using three groups of real data were conducted to compare the anomaly detection results of the proposed method with those of manual recognition. The comparison results indicated that the proposed LSTM network achieves promising results and is viable for detecting anomalies in earthquake precursor data.