Bayesian Learning Using Automatic Relevance Determination Prior with an Application to Earthquake Early Warning

A novel method of Bayesian learning with automatic relevance determination prior is presented that provides a powerful approach to problems of classification based on data features, for example, classifying soil liquefaction potential based on soil and seismic shaking parameters, automatically classifying the damage states of a structure after severe loading based on features of its dynamic response, and real-time classification of earthquakes based on seismic signals. After introduction of the theory, the method is illustrated by applying it to an earthquake record dataset from nine earthquakes to build an efficient real-time algorithm for near-source versus far-source classification of incoming seismic ground motion signals. This classification is needed in the development of early warning systems for large earthquakes. It is shown that the proposed methodology is promising since it provides a classifier with higher correct classification rates and better generalization performance than a previous Bayesian learning method with a fixed prior distribution that was applied to the same classification problem.