Frontiers in Earth Science (Sep 2022)
Temporal variations of the probability distribution of voronoi cells generated by earthquake epicenters
Abstract
The area of the cells of Voronoi tessellations has been modelled through different probability distributions among which the most promising are the generalized gamma and tapered Pareto distributions. In particular the latter has been used to model times and distances between successive earthquakes besides area and perimeter of cells generated by earthquake epicenters. In the framework of nonextensive statistical mechanics applied in geophysics, variables like seismic moment, inter-event time or Euclidean distance between successive earthquakes or length of faults in a given region have been studied through the so-called q-exponential distributions obtained by maximizing the Tsallis entropy under suitable conditions. These distributions take also the name of generalized Pareto distributions in the context of the limit distributions of excesses. In this work we consider the spatial distribution of a set of earthquakes and its temporal variations by modelling the area of Voronoi cells generated by the epicenters through a generalized Pareto distribution. Following the Bayesian paradigm we analyze the recent seismicity of the central Italy and we compare the posterior marginal likelihood of the aforementioned distributions in shifting time windows. We point out that the best fitting distribution varies over time and the trend of all three distributions converges to that of the exponential distribution in the preparatory phase for the mainshock.
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