The depth of a seismic event is an essential feature to discriminate natural earthquakes from events induced or created by humans. However, estimating the depth of a seismic event with a sparse set of seismic stations is a daunting task, and there is no globally usable method. This paper focuses on developing a machine learning model to accurately estimate the depth of arbitrary seismic events directly from seismograms. Our proposed deep learning architecture is not-so-deep compared to commonly found models in the literature for related tasks, consisting of two loosely connected levels of neural networks, associated with the seismic stations at the higher level and the individual channels of a station at the lower level. Thus, the model has significant advantages, including a reduced number of parameters for tuning and better interpretability to geophysicists. We evaluate our solution on seismic data collected from the SCEDC (Southern California Earthquake Data Center) catalog for regional events in California. The model can learn waveform features specific to a set of stations, while it struggles to generalize to completely novel sets of event sources and stations. In a simplified setting of separating shallow events from deep ones, the model achieved an 86.5% F1-score using the Southern California stations.

Seismic phase identification classifies the type of seismic wave received at a station based on the waveform (i.e., time series) recorded by a seismometer. Automated phase identification is an integrated component of large scale seismic monitoring applications, including earthquake warning systems and underground explosion monitoring. Accurate, fast, and fine-grained phase identification is instrumental for earthquake location estimation, understanding Earth's crustal and mantle structure for predictive modeling, etc. However, existing operational systems utilize multiple nearby stations for precise identification, which delays response time with added complexity and manual interventions. Moreover, single-station systems mostly perform coarse phase identification. In this paper, we revisit the seismic phase classification as an integrated part of a seismic processing pipeline. We develop a machine-learned model FASER, that takes input from a signal detector and produces phase types as output for a signal associator. The model is a combination of convolutional and long short-term memory networks. Our method identifies finer wave types, including crustal and mantle phases. We conduct comprehensive experiments on real datasets to show that FASER outperforms existing baselines. We evaluate FASER holding out sources and stations across the world to demonstrate consistent performance for novel sources and stations.

Unlike semi-supervised clustering, classification and rule discovery; semi-supervised motif discovery is a surprisingly unexplored area in data mining. Semi-supervised Motif Discovery finds hidden patterns in long time series when a few arbitrarily known patterns are given. A naive approach is to exploit the known patterns and perform similarity search within a radius of the patterns. However, this method would find only similar shapes and would be limited in discovering new shapes. In contrast, traditional unsupervised motif discovery algorithms detect new shapes, while missing some patterns because the given information is not utilized. We propose a semi-supervised motif discovery algorithm that forms a nearest neighbor graph to identify chains of nearest neighbors from the given events. We demonstrate that the chains are likely to identify hidden patterns in the data. We have applied the method to find novel events in several geoscientific datasets more accurately than existing methods.