ON THE CO-OCCURRENCE OF DIFFERENT MAGNITUDE EARTHQUAKES: SOUTHWESTERN CHINA CASE

Abstract

In this study, we build a Markov chain model for the earthquakes in Southwestern China by following the maximum entropy principle, while the states of Markov chain are the co-occurrence of earthquakes with different magnitudes. In this case an approximation is to focus on just the occurrences of the most serious magnitude earthquakes and neglect the others. Our approximation to this situation is to take into account all magnitude earthquakes if they occur at least once in any given period. In order to reveal the feature of this Markov chain in respect of first passage time distributions we run a long term simulation with occurrences of all the 3 categories of earthquakes. Finally, we give both fitted distributions and multinomial approximations to the distribution of first passage time for some states.