Nonlinear Methodologies for Identifying Seismic Event and Nuclear Explosion Using Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, and Naive Bayes Classification

The discrimination of seismic event and nuclear explosion is a complex and nonlinear system. The nonlinear methodologies including Random Forests (RF), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Naïve Bayes Classifier (NBC) were applied to discriminant seismic events. Twenty earthquakes and twenty-seven explosions with nine ratios of the energies contained within predetermined “velocity windows” and calculated distance are used in discriminators. Based on the one out cross-validation, ROC curve, calculated accuracy of training and test samples, and discriminating performances of RF, SVM, and NBC were discussed and compared. The result of RF method clearly shows the best predictive power with a maximum area of 0.975 under the ROC among RF, SVM, and NBC. The discriminant accuracies of RF, SVM, and NBC for test samples are 92.86%, 85.71%, and 92.86%, respectively. It has been demonstrated that the presented RF model can not only identify seismic event automatically with high accuracy, but also can sort the discriminant indicators according to calculated values of weights.