Earthquake forecast models for Italy based on the RI algorithm

This study provides an overview of relative-intensity (RI)-based earthquake forecast models that have been submitted for the 5-year and 10-year testing classes and the 3-month class of the Italian experiment within the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP). The RI algorithm starts as a binary forecast system based on the working assumption that future large earthquakes are considered likely to occur at sites of higher seismic activity in the past. The measure of RI is the simply counting of the number of past earthquakes, which is known as the RI of seismicity. To improve the RI forecast performance, we first expand the RI algorithm to become part of a general class of smoothed seismicity models. We then convert the RI representation from a binary system into a testable CSEP model that forecasts the numbers of earthquakes for the predefined magnitudes. Our parameter tuning for the CSEP models is based on the past seismicity. The final submission is a set of two numerical data files that were created by tuned 5-year and 10-year models and an executable computer code of a tuned 3-month model, to examine which testing class is more meaningful in terms of the RI hypothesis. The main purpose of our participation is to better understand the importance (or lack of importance) of relative intensity of seismicity for earthquake forecastability. 1