Statistical Analysis of the Completeness of a Seismic Catalogue

Among the numerous issues that the study of seismic events presents, theincompleteness of catalogues is certainly one of the most important. It is also one that only the contribution of many and different skills canprovide with a valid solution. In this paper the search for the complete part of a catalogue is expressed in terms of identification of the changepoint in a hierarchical Bayesian model. Stochastic simulation methods, recently presented in the literature, have enabled us to overcome the computational issues that previously made this approach prohibitive. We have applied the method on data, drawn from the Italian NT4.1.1 catalogue,related to some seismogenetic zones of ZS.4 zonation within which we assumespatial incompleteness to be homogeneous. The results obtained are given inthe concluding sections of the paper. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002