Finding Possible Precursors for the 2015 Cotopaxi Volcano Eruption Using Unsupervised Machine Learning Techniques

Abstract

Cotopaxi Volcano showed an increased activity since April 2015 and evolved into its eventual mild eruption in August 2015. In this work we use records from a broadband seismic station located at less than 4 km from the vent that encompass data from April to December of 2015, to detect and study low-frequency seismic events. We applied unsupervised learning schemes to group and identify possible premonitory low-frequency seismic families. To find these families we applied a two-stage process in which the events were first separated by their frequency content by applying the k-means algorithm to the spectral density vector of the signals and then were further separated by their waveform by applying Correntropy and Dynamic Time Warping. As a result, we found a particular family related to the volcano’s state of activity by exploring its time distribution and estimating its events’ locations.