Developing an expert system based on association rules and predicate logic for earthquake prediction

Expert systems (ES) are a branch of applied artificial intelligence. The basic idea behind ES is simply that expertise, which is the vast body of task-specific knowledge, is transferred from a human to a computer. ES provide powerful and flexible means for obtaining solutions to a variety of problems that often cannot be dealt with by other, more traditional and orthodox methods. Thus, their use is proliferating to many sectors of our social and technological life, where their applications are proving to be critical in the process of decision support and problem solving. Earthquake professionals for many decades have recognized the benefits to society from reliable earthquake predictions, but uncertainties regarding source initiation, rupture phenomena, and accuracy of both the timing and magnitude of the earthquake occurrence have often times seemed either very difficult or impossible to overcome. This research proposes and implements an expert system to predict earthquakes from previous data. This is achieved by applying association rule mining on earthquake data from 1972 to 2013. These associations are polished using predicate-logic techniques to draw stimulating production-rules to be used with a rule-based expert system. The proposed expert system was able to predict all earthquakes which actually occurred within 12 h at-most. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.