Deep learning and transfer learning of earthquake and quarry-blast discrimination: applications to southern California and eastern Kentucky

SUMMARY Discrimination between tectonic earthquakes (EQs) and quarry blasts is important for accurate EQ cataloguing and seismic hazard analysis. However, reliable classification of these two types of seismic events is challenging with no prior knowledge of source parameters. Here, we applied deep learning to perform this classification task in southern California and eastern Kentucky. Since the two regions differ significantly in available labelled data, class imbalance and waveform characteristics, we adopted different strategies for them. We directly trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) for southern California due to its data abundancy. To alleviate the class imbalance, the blast data were augmented by repeated sampling. The model for California yields F1-scores of >83.5 per cent when estimated by individual stations and >98.1 per cent by network average (i.e. averaging the CNN’s outputs on all available stations for each event). As eastern Kentucky has a much smaller data size, we apply transfer learning to the pre-trained California model to fit the Kentucky data. The transfer-learned model yields F1-scores of >86.9 per cent when estimated by individual stations and >96.7 per cent by network average. The transfer-learned model outperforms the model re-trained from scratch for the Kentucky data. Gradient-weighted class activation mapping shows the S onset and the S long-period coda are important to identify EQs and blasts, respectively. By visual inspections of the seismograms, the source locations, the origin time and the P-wave polarities, we verified that most of the events falsely predicted by our models are actually mislabelled by seismic analysts. Our models thus show great potential in helping seismic analysts find those mislabelled events which remain hidden in the historical catalogue. Our results demonstrate that deep learning can achieve high accuracy in seismic event discrimination and that transfer learning is effective and efficient to generalize deep learning models across different regions.