Reservoir induced earthquakes analyzed via radial basis function networks

Estimation of the magnitude of reservoir induced seismicity is essential for seismic risk analysis of dam sites. Different geological and empirical methods dealing with the mechanism or magnitude of such earthquakes are available in the literature. In this study, a method based on an artificial neural network utilizing radial basis functions (RBF network) was employed to analyze the problem. The network has only two input neurons, one representing the maximum depth of the reservoir and the other being a comprehensive parameter representing reservoir geometry. Magnitudes of the induced earthquakes predicted using the RBF network were compared with the actual recorded data. Compared with the conventional statistical approach, the proposed method gives a better prediction, both in terms of coefficients of correlation and error rates.