Seismic Events Discrimination Using a New FLVQ Clustering Model

In this paper, the LVQ (Learning Vector Quantization) model and its variants are regarded as the clustering tools to discriminate the natural seismic events (earthquakes) from the artificial ones (nuclear explosions). The study is based on the six spectral features of the P-wave spectra computed from the short period teleseismic recordings. The conventional LVQ proposed by Kohenen [2] and also the Fuzzy LVQ (FLVQ) models proposed by Sakuraba [16] and Bezdek [2] are all tested on a set of 26 earthquakes and 24 nuclear explosions using the leave-one-out testing strategy. The primary experimental results have shown that the shapes, the number and also the overlaps of the clusters play an important role in seismic classification. The results also showed how an improper feature space partitioning would strongly weaken both the clustering and recognition phases. To improve the numerical results, a new combined FLVQ algorithm is employed in this paper. The algorithm is composed of two nested sub-algorithms. The inner sub-algorithm tries to generate a well-defined fuzzy partitioning with the fuzzy reference vectors in the feature space. To achieve this goal, a cost function is defined as a function of the number, the shapes and also the overlaps of the fuzzy reference vectors. The update rule tries to minimize this cost function in a stepwise learning algorithm. On the other hand, the outer sub-algorithm tries to find an optimum value for the number of the clusters, in each step. For this optimization in the outer loop, we have used two different criteria. In the first criterion, the newly defined “fuzzy entropy” is used while in the second criterion, a performance index is employed by generalizing the Huntsberger formula [10] for the learning rate, using the concept of fuzzy distance. The experimental results of the new model show a promising improvement in the error rate, an acceptable convergence time, and also more flexibility in boundary decision making. key words: seismic P-wave, short period recording, teleseismic, discrimination, fuzzy logic