About Earthquake Forecasting by Markov Renewal Processes

There is a new paper in Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability by Garavaglia and Pavani. This concerns the forecasting of earthquakes. They analyse data on severe earthquakes in Turkey during the 20th century. Two approaches were considered. Firstly a two-state semi-Markov model is proposed to model the process. The states represent the occurrence of earthquakes of magnitude 5.5 - 6.3 and greater than 6.3 respectively. However, the probability that the next earthquake is of magnitude greater than 6.3 is seen to not depend on the magnitude of the last earthquake. Hence, instead a model based only on the inter-event times is considered using an exponential-Weibull mixture distribution.