Search

Grouping of earthquakes into distinct clusters is applied to improve mechanism identification and pattern recognition for active seismicity in a region. One of the important issues concerning earthquake data clustering is determining the optimum number of clusters (ONC) at the early stages of algorithms. In this paper a robust method based on K-nearest neighbor search (KNNS) is presented to achieve three goals: improving output accuracy, improving output stability, and adding the ability to weight the features used in ONC determination. By introducing a new formula, the proposed method utilizes the error calculated for clustered data based on the similarity between the members in each cluster. An outlier attenuation algorithm is also used to improve the performance of the method. Both the Krzanowski–Lai Index (KLI) and the silhouette coefficient (SC), as two conventional methods, were used to compare the results and evaluate the performance. Experiments on synthetic data sets verified the effectiveness of the method, with considerable differences found. The clustering of a real earthquake catalogue related to the seismogenic province of Zagros in Persia using our proposed methodology suggests using 13-cluster analysis for clustering based on the spatiotemporal features with the same weights, and seven-cluster analysis for a case where priority is given only to the spatial parameters of the epicenters. Under the same circumstances, the KLI and SC methods suggest three and 18 clusters, respectively. The results of the experiments on synthetic data sets indicate that the proposed method is quantitatively more stable and more accurate than the other two methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]