Machine learning for predicting earthquake magnitudes in the Central Himalaya

Abstract

Human intervention cannot halt natural disasters like earthquakes, but machine learning application expertise can be utilized to detect patterns in data and increase understanding and predictive power. Recent development of machine learning models has increasingly developed interest in forecasting and predicting the magnitude of earthquakes. In this work, Random Forest Regressor (RFR), Multi-Layer Perceptron Regressor(MLPR), and Support Vector Regression (SVR) models were employed to predict the magnitude of greater than 6 mb earthquakes that occurred in the year 2015 in the central Himalaya. We noticed RFR method had been able to predict the magnitude of the Gorkha earthquake (6.9mb), and the Kodariearthquake (6.7 mb) in comparison with the other two models. We also checked the performance of these models by three parameters Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Squared Error (MSE), and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and noticed the better performance of RFR model. The findings illustrate that RFR is achieving better performance than the other two algorithms, as the predicted magnitudes are close to the actual magnitudes.