Bureau Team Wins International Earthquake Forecasting Competition

December 12, 2023

The Bureau of Economic Geology’s Yangkang Chen led a team to win first place in the 2022 AETA Earthquake Prediction AI Algorithm Competition hosted by Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School in China, a competition that included 600 international teams.

Chen is a research associate at the bureau. His team included the bureau’s Alexandros Savvaidis, Sergey Fomel, Dino Huang and researchers from other institutions. Chen’s same team also landed second place in this competition in 2021.

Previously, research that leveraged AI techniques for precursory signal detection or earthquake prediction were all retrospective studies, meaning that investigations were based on historical data sets and models that could be tuned until the best-fitting performance was found. For the competition, the team conducted AI-based real-time earthquake prediction in both 2021 and 2022.

The team developed a data-driven model for predicting natural, destructive earthquakes (events equal to or greater than magnitude 3.5) in a specific geographic area based on AI and big data analysis. It applied the proposed data-driven model to a real-time earthquake prediction competition lasting two years and obtained a prediction accuracy of 70% in terms of earthquake occurrence, location and magnitude. The accuracy ranked second in the first year of the competition (2021) and first in its second year (2022). Chen said that the high score for consecutive two-year predictions among all participating teams indicates the effectiveness of the team’s AI model.

This work has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.