Volcano-Seismic Events Classification Using Document Classification Strategies

In this paper we propose a novel framework for the classification of volcano-seismic events, based on strategies and concepts typically employed to classify documents – subsequently largely employed also in other fields. In the proposed approach, we define a dictionary of “seismic words”, used to represent a seismic event as a “seismic document” (i.e. a collection of seismic words). Given this representation, we exploit two well-known models for documents (Bag-of-words and topic models) to derive signatures for seismic events, usable for classification. An empirical evaluation, based on a set of seismic signals from Galeras volcano in Colombia, confirms the potentialities of the proposed scheme, both in terms of interpretability and classification accuracies, also in comparison with standard approaches.