Given the map of the predictions versus the actual locations of the earthquakes, I'm not prepared to celebrate the accomplishment here. It looks as if in the essential details, the prediction is just flat out wrong--it's consistently predicting earthquakes in the wrong basin.
Actually, digging in a little more, I'm even more suspicious. The article says
> The outcome was a weekly forecast in which the AI successfully predicted 14 earthquakes within about 200 miles of where it estimated they would happen and at almost exactly the calculated strength. It missed one earthquake and gave eight false warnings.
A "weekly forecast" isn't terribly descriptive, but it sounds to me like a prediction "Will an earthquake occur this week? If so, where and at what strength?" Given that it's 14 earthquakes over a 7 month period (i.e., about 30 weeks), that means you're looking mostly if not entirely at small, probably unnoticeable earthquakes. It also means that there's basically a coin flip of whether or not an earthquake will occur--and if you score it on the accuracy of predicting such, it comes out to 30% wrong (so the p-value, if I'm doing it right is 0.02, which I guess is significant, although if another commenter is right and this is the best of 600 competitive entrants, it should be expected that one would look this good).
Given that both the timing and the location accuracy look less than impressive, the next question is how good a job it did at predicting the magnitude. There's no details on the accuracy here, but given the location accuracy is hailed as impressive despite being clearly visually less than so, it wouldn't surprise me that the magnitude predictions are similarly garbage.
In short, this feels like merely continued evolution in the history of earthquake prediction techniques rather than a revolution, which is to say something that is loudly hailed as being a good start yet turns out to go absolutely nowhere.
They dumped a bunch of data on pca and random forests then only talked about when it happened to be right. Don't get your hopes up that this paper will go anywhere.
Actually, digging in a little more, I'm even more suspicious. The article says
> The outcome was a weekly forecast in which the AI successfully predicted 14 earthquakes within about 200 miles of where it estimated they would happen and at almost exactly the calculated strength. It missed one earthquake and gave eight false warnings.
A "weekly forecast" isn't terribly descriptive, but it sounds to me like a prediction "Will an earthquake occur this week? If so, where and at what strength?" Given that it's 14 earthquakes over a 7 month period (i.e., about 30 weeks), that means you're looking mostly if not entirely at small, probably unnoticeable earthquakes. It also means that there's basically a coin flip of whether or not an earthquake will occur--and if you score it on the accuracy of predicting such, it comes out to 30% wrong (so the p-value, if I'm doing it right is 0.02, which I guess is significant, although if another commenter is right and this is the best of 600 competitive entrants, it should be expected that one would look this good).
Given that both the timing and the location accuracy look less than impressive, the next question is how good a job it did at predicting the magnitude. There's no details on the accuracy here, but given the location accuracy is hailed as impressive despite being clearly visually less than so, it wouldn't surprise me that the magnitude predictions are similarly garbage.
In short, this feels like merely continued evolution in the history of earthquake prediction techniques rather than a revolution, which is to say something that is loudly hailed as being a good start yet turns out to go absolutely nowhere.