Bureau of Economic Geology, John A. and Katherine G. Jackson School of Geosciences, The University of Texas at Austin, University Station, Austin, TX 78713-8924, USA
Effective and efficient arrival picking plays an important role in microseismic and earthquake data processing and imaging. Widely used short-term-average long-term-average ratio (STA/LTA) based arrival picking algorithms suffer from the sensitivity to moderate-to-strong random ambient noise. To make the state-of-the-art arrival picking approaches effective, microseismic data need to be first pre-processed, for example, removing sufficient amount of noise, and second analysed by arrival pickers. To conquer the noise issue in arrival picking for weak microseismic or earthquake event, I leverage the machine learning techniques to help recognizing seismic waveforms in microseismic or earthquake data. Because of the dependency of supervised machine learning algorithm on large volume of well-designed training data, I utilize an unsupervised machine learning algorithm to help cluster the time samples into two groups, that is, waveform points and non-waveform points. The fuzzy clustering algorithm has been demonstrated to be effective for such purpose. A group of synthetic, real microseismic and earthquake data sets with different levels of complexity show that the proposed method is much more robust than the state-of-the-art STA/LTA method in picking microseismic events, even in the case of moderately strong background noise.
@article{osti_1634139,
author = {Chen, Yangkang},
title = {Automatic microseismic event picking via unsupervised machine learning},
annote = {SUMMARY Effective and efficient arrival picking plays an important role in microseismic and earthquake data processing and imaging. Widely used short-term-average long-term-average ratio (STA/LTA) based arrival picking algorithms suffer from the sensitivity to moderate-to-strong random ambient noise. To make the state-of-the-art arrival picking approaches effective, microseismic data need to be first pre-processed, for example, removing sufficient amount of noise, and second analysed by arrival pickers. To conquer the noise issue in arrival picking for weak microseismic or earthquake event, I leverage the machine learning techniques to help recognizing seismic waveforms in microseismic or earthquake data. Because of the dependency of supervised machine learning algorithm on large volume of well-designed training data, I utilize an unsupervised machine learning algorithm to help cluster the time samples into two groups, that is, waveform points and non-waveform points. The fuzzy clustering algorithm has been demonstrated to be effective for such purpose. A group of synthetic, real microseismic and earthquake data sets with different levels of complexity show that the proposed method is much more robust than the state-of-the-art STA/LTA method in picking microseismic events, even in the case of moderately strong background noise.},
doi = {10.1093/gji/ggaa186},
url = {https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1634139},
journal = {Geophysical Journal International},
issn = {ISSN 0956-540X},
number = {3},
volume = {222},
place = {United Kingdom},
publisher = {Oxford University Press},
year = {2020},
month = {06}}
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Vol. 454, Issue 1971https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1998.0193