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Hidden Markov Modeling of Waiting Times in the 1985 Yellowstone Earthquake Swarm

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Abstract

Earthquake swarms occur in many regions of the world. The study of earthquake swarms is very limited, and most contributions are descriptive. In this paper we propose use of a hidden Markov model to estimate the distribution of waiting times for swarm earthquakes and apply this approach to the largest earthquake swarm in the history of the Yellowstone area. Hidden Markov modeling is superior to modeling using either single distributions or finite mixture distributions because of the heterogeneity of data and temporal dependencies in earthquake sequences.

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Acknowledgments

We thank R.B. Smith for providing the data and R.M. Altman for help in goodness-of-fit tests. Discussion with G. Waite helped improve the manuscript. We also thank three anonymous reviewers, whose comments substantively improved the paper.

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  1. University of Wyoming, Laramie, USA

    Yumei Li & Richard Anderson-Sprecher

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  1. Yumei Li
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  2. Richard Anderson-Sprecher
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Correspondence to Yumei Li.

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Li, Y., Anderson-Sprecher, R. Hidden Markov Modeling of Waiting Times in the 1985 Yellowstone Earthquake Swarm. Pure Appl. Geophys. 170, 785–795 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-011-0323-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-011-0323-1

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