Variational Autoencoders for P-wave detection on strong motion earthquake spectrograms

Date

2026-08-01

Author

Ispak, Turkan Simge
Tileylioglu, Salih
Akagündüz, Erdem

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Accurate P-wave detection is critical for earthquake early warning, yet strong-motion records pose challenges due to high noise levels, limited labeled data, and complex waveform characteristics. This study reframes P-wave arrival detection as a self-supervised anomaly detection task to evaluate how architectural variations regulate the trade-off between reconstruction fidelity and anomaly discrimination. Through a comprehensive grid search of 492 Variational Autoencoder configurations, we show that while skip connections minimize reconstruction error (Mean Absolute Error approximately 0.0012), they induce “overgeneralization”, allowing the model to reconstruct noise and masking the detection signal. In contrast, attention mechanisms prioritize global context over local detail and yield the highest detection performance with an area-under-the-curve of 0.875. The attention-based Variational Autoencoder achieves an area-under-the-curve of 0.91 in the 0 to 40-kilometer near-source range, indicating potential for early warning applications. These findings indicate that architectural constraints favoring global context over pixel-perfect reconstruction are important for robust, self-supervised P-wave detection.

Subject Keywords

Deep learning, Earthquake early warning, P-wave detection, Strong motion spectrograms, Variational Autoencoders

URI

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=105044226512&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119857

Collections

Graduate School of Informatics, Article