Real-time Prediction of Distance and PGA from P-wave features using Gradient Boosting Regressor for On-Site Earthquake Early Warning Applications

On-site earthquake early warning (EEW) systems represent an important way to reduce seismic hazard. Since these systems are fast in providing an alert and reliable in the prediction of the ground motion intensity at targets, they are particularly suitable in the areas where the seismogenic zones are close to cities and infrastructures, such as Central Italy. In this work, we use Gradient Boosting Regressor (GBR) to predict peak ground acceleration (PGA), and hypocentral distance (D) starting from P-wave features. We use two data sets of waveforms from two seismic sequences in Central Italy: L’Aquila sequence (2009) and the Amatrice–Norcia–Visso sequence (2016–2017), for a total of about 80 000 three-component waveforms. We compute 60 different features related to the physics of the earthquake using three different time windows (1 s, 2 s and 3 s). We validate and train our models using the 2016–2017 data sets (the bigger one) and we test it on the 2009 data set. We study the performance...