On the relationship between lower magnitude thresholds and bias 2 in epidemic ‐ type aftershock sequence parameter estimates

5 [1] Modern earthquake catalogs are often described using spatial‐temporal point process 6 models such as the epidemic‐type aftershock sequence (ETAS) models of Ogata (1998). 7 Earthquake catalogs often have issues of incompleteness and other inaccuracies for 8 earthquakes of magnitude below a certain threshold, and such earthquakes are typically 9 removed prior to fitting a point process model. This paper investigates the bias in the 10 parameters in ETAS models introduced by the removal of the smallest events. It is shown 11 that in the case of most of the ETAS parameters, the bias increases approximately 12 exponentially as a function of the lower magnitude cutoff.