Estimation of radon as an earthquake precursor: a neural network approach

An artificial neural networks (ANN) approach combined with Fourier transform based selection of time period in the time series Radon Emission Data has been presented and shown to improve event prediction rates and reduce false alarms in earthquake event identification over the traditional multiple linear regression techniques. The paper presents a neural networks system using radial basis function (RBF) network as an alternative to traditional statistical regression technique in isolating Radon Emission Anomaly caused by seismic activities. The RBF model has been developed to accept and predict earthquakes events based on a known data set of Radon Emanation, Metrological parameters and actual earthquake events. Subsequently, the model was tested and evaluated on a future data set and a prediction rate of 87.8%, if a reduced false alarm was achieved, the results obtained are better than the traditional techniques. (author)