Adaptive Training of Neural Networks for Automatic Seismic Phase Identification

A neural network module has been implemented in the Prototype International Data Centre (PIDC) for automated identification of the initial phase type of seismic detections. Initial training of the neural networks for stations of the International Monitoring System (IMS) requires considerable effort. While there are many seismic phases in the analyst-reviewed database that can be assumed as the ground-truth resource of the initial phase type of Teleseism (T), Regional P (P), and Regional S (S), no ground-truth database of noise (N) is available. To reduce analyst effort required in building a ground-truth database, an "Adaptive Training Approach" is proposed in this paper. This approach automatically selects training patterns to take advantage of the learning ability of neural networks and information on the accumulated observation database. Using this approach, neural networks were trained on the data provided by station STKA, Australia. The performance of automated phase identification has been improved significantly by the retrained neural networks. This approach is also validated by comparison with the performance using the ground-truth noise database.