pyCSEP: A Python Toolkit for Earthquake Forecast Developers

The Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP) is an open and global community whose mission is to accelerate earthquake predictability research through rigorous testing of probabilistic earthquake forecast models and prediction algorithms. pyCSEP supports this mission by providing open‐source implementations of useful tools for evaluating earthquake forecasts. pyCSEP is a Python package that contains the following modules: (1) earthquake catalog access and processing, (2) representations of probabilistic earthquake forecasts, (3) statistical tests for evaluating earthquake forecasts, and (4) visualization routines and various other utilities. Most significantly, pyCSEP contains several statistical tests needed to evaluate earthquake forecasts, which can be forecasts expressed as expected earthquake rates in space–magnitude bins or specified as large sets of simulated catalogs (which includes candidate models for governmental operational earthquake forecasting). To showcase how pyCSEP can be used to evaluate earthquake forecasts, we have provided a reproducibility package that contains all the components required to re‐create the figures published in this article. We recommend that interested readers work through the reproducibility package alongside this article. By providing useful tools to earthquake forecast modelers and facilitating an open‐source software community, we hope to broaden the impact of the CSEP and further promote earthquake forecasting research.This research was supported by the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC; Contribution Number 11740). SCEC is funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) Cooperative Agreement EAR‐1600087 and U.S. Geological Survey Cooperative Agreement Number G17AC00047. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement Number 821115, Real‐time earthquake rIsk reduction for a reSilient Europe (RISE)