DescribeEvents/earthquake_region_events

Earthquake Region Events

Curated global earthquake event sequences from the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program, designed for temporal point process (TPP) and marked temporal point process (MTPP) modeling. Each sequence captures a chronologically-ordered global seismic timeline from one calendar quarter, where the prediction target is the broad tectonic zone of each earthquake.

Schema

Each record is a dictionary with 8 fields:

Field	Type	Description
seq_idx	int	Sequence index
seq_len	int	Number of events in the sequence
description	str	Natural language description of the quarter's seismic activity
metadata	str (JSON)	quarter, time_unit, time_range_epoch, num_zones, zone_distribution
time_since_start	list[float]	Time since the first event (in days)
time_since_last_event	list[float]	Time since the previous event (in days)
type_event	list[str]	Tectonic zone label (see below)
type_text	list[str]	Natural language description of each event

Event Types (8 tectonic zones)

Events are drawn from 37 fine-grained seismic regions and mapped to 8 coarse tectonic zones for more balanced classes and a more learnable prediction target:

Zone	Events	Description
SE-Asia-Oceania	3,871	Indo-Australian, Philippine Sea, Pacific, and Sunda plate convergence
Central-South-America	1,982	Nazca/Cocos subduction beneath South American and Caribbean plates
SW-Pacific	1,728	Tonga-Kermadec and Hikurangi Trenches
NW-Pacific	1,297	Kuril-Kamchatka and Japan Trenches
North-America	618	Aleutian, Cascadia, San Andreas systems
Mediterranean-Middle-East	580	African/Arabian-Eurasian convergence
Central-South-Asia	255	Himalayan collision and Hindu Kush-Pamir deep seismicity
Atlantic-Africa	179	Mid-Atlantic Ridge and East African Rift

Curation Filters

Sequences are selected to represent seismically active quarters with diverse tectonic zone activity:

Filter	Value	Description
min-magnitude	5.0	Only M5.0+ earthquakes included
min-seq-size	30	Min events per quarter chunk
max-seq-size	50	Max events per quarter chunk
min-types	4	At least 4 distinct tectonic zones per sequence
max-dominant-ratio	0.50	Drop sequences where any single zone exceeds 50% of events
start-date	2010-01-01	Earliest event date
end-date	2025-12-31	Latest event date

Additional processing:

• Non-earthquake event types are excluded
• Events with missing magnitude are skipped
• 37 fine-grained seismic regions mapped to 8 coarse tectonic zones

Event Text

Each event's type_text contains physical characteristics without explicit zone labels:

Moderate earthquake (M5.1 mb), on the Complex convergence of the Indo-Australian, Philippine Sea, Pacific, and Sunda plates along multiple subduction zones, at 35.0km depth, located 148 km NNE of Lospalos, Timor Leste. Detected by 78 stations. azimuthal gap of 30°. Significance score: 400

The model must learn to predict the tectonic zone from seismic signatures (magnitude, depth, tectonic context, detection patterns).

Example

{
  "seq_idx": 0,
  "seq_len": 45,
  "description": "Global earthquake sequence for Q1 2020...",
  "metadata": "{\"quarter\": \"Q1 2020\", \"time_unit\": \"days\", \"time_range_epoch\": [...], \"num_zones\": 7, \"zone_distribution\": {\"SE-Asia-Oceania\": 18, ...}}",
  "time_since_start": [0.0, 0.42, 1.15, ...],
  "time_since_last_event": [0.0, 0.42, 0.73, ...],
  "type_event": ["SE-Asia-Oceania", "NW-Pacific", "SW-Pacific", ...],
  "type_text": ["Moderate earthquake (M5.1 mb), on the Complex convergence...", ...]
}

Intended Use

• Training and evaluating temporal point process models
• Studying global seismic activity patterns across tectonic zones
• Benchmarking next-event prediction and event forecasting
• Modeling marked temporal point processes with rich text marks

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

@dataset{earthquake_region_events_2025,
  title={Earthquake Region Events},
  author={XiaoBB},
  year={2025},
  url={https://huggingface.co/datasets/XiaoBB/earthquake_region_events},
  note={Curated from USGS Earthquake Hazards Program, 2014-2025}
}