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Modernizing Earthquake Forecasts Testing and Experimentation: CSEP Open-Software Contributions

Description: 

The Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP) is an international research community that supports earthquake predictability research through rigorous testing of earthquake forecasting models. Traditionally, CSEP experiments were facilitated by a server infrastructure that autonomously performed model evaluations and whose first implementation used centralized servers tightly coupled to the testing software. Open-science initiatives and open-source software development, however, led CSEP to improve this framework. First, a software toolkit for earthquake forecast users, pyCSEP, was developed to include the core scientific routines for evaluating forecasts, such as: (1) earthquake catalog access and processing, (2) representations of probabilistic earthquake forecast models, both gridded- and catalog-based, (3) statistical tests for earthquake forecast evaluation, and (4) visualization routines. pyCSEP is being continuously developed by a community of researchers who vet its source code and keep up with new testing theoretical methods.

To further improve the experimentation process, CSEP experiments will be redesigned to (i) safeguard an experiment’s reproducibility, (ii) facilitate their transparency, accessibility, and persistence, (iii) standardize experimental procedures, and (iv) benchmark experiments for future model developments. To this end, a novel format called Floating Experiment is being developed and managed by the application floatCSEP. The testing process is decentralized from a physical infrastructure, aiming at full reproducibility on any machine, given sufficient computational power. The experiment definition, rules, artifacts, and environment are encapsulated as source code and readily curated in open-data repositories. These Floating Experiments are then live reproducibility software packages able to process, update and deliver results on-demand, both by authoritative institutions and independent users. The CSEP community envisions pyCSEP and floatCSEP as essential elements in a larger software ecosystem that can be used together to quantify earthquake hazards and risk.

Session: New Insights into the Development, Testing and Communication of Seismicity Forecasts - I

Type: Oral

Date: 5/2/2024

Presentation Time: 05:15 PM (local time)

Presenting Author: Pablo

Student Presenter: Yes

Invited Presentation: Yes

Authors