Geophys. J. Int. (2011) ???

, 18

Are declustered earthquake catalogs Poisson?

Brad Luen
Department of Mathematics
Reed College
Portland, OR, USA

Philip B. Stark
Department of Statistics
University of California
Berkeley, CA, 94720-3860 USA

Accepted 2011 ???? ??; Received 2011 January ??; in original form 2011 January 29

SUMMARY
We present strong statistical evidence thatcontrary to previous claimsspatially in-
homogeneous, temporally homogeneous Poisson process (SITHP) models do not fit
declustered Southern California seismicity catalogs. Earlier claims were based on tests
that divide time into intervals, count the events in those intervals, and apply a chi-
square test to the counts, approximating the expected number of intervals with each
event count by estimating the rate of the hypothesized Poisson process from the data.
This test lacks a sound statistical basis and can have low power, for at least two rea-
sons: (1) It ignores earthquake locations. (2) It ignores the order of the time intervals.
For instance, if the test does not reject for a given set of counts, it would not reject if
those counts had occurred in decreasing order with time, which would be implausible
for a SITHP. We evaluate declustered catalogs derived from the 19321971 Southern
California Earthquake Center catalog of 1,556 events with magnitude 3.8 and above
by applying four window declustering methods. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov temporal test
finds P -values of 0.006 to 0.022 for the hypothesis that the declustered catalogs fol-
low a homogeneous temporal Poisson processpoor fit. Since homogeneous Poisson
processes do not fit the marginal temporal distribution, SITHPs cannot not fit the
spatio-temporal distribution. The hypothesis that declustered catalogs follow a SITHP
implies the weaker hypothesis that event times and locations in declustered catalogs
are conditionally exchangeable. For three of the declustered catalogs, a nonparametric
spatio-temporal test finds P -values of 0.005 or below for this weaker hypothesis. For
the fourth declustered catalog, the P -value is 0.069, above 0.05 but still small.
Key words: Earthquake interaction, forecasting, and prediction; Probabilistic fore-
casting; Statistical seismology

1 INTRODUCTION
Earthquake catalogs are often declustered as a precursor to
modeling the remaining events as a realization of a spatially
inhomogeneous, temporally homogeneous Poisson process
(SITHP). Tests of the null hypothesis that declustered cat-
alogs are realizations of a SITHP have not rejected the null
hypothesis, leading some studies to conclude that declus-
tered catalogs are Poisson. For instance, the title of Gard-
ner and Knopoff (1974) is Is the sequence of earthquakes in
Southern California, with aftershocks removed, Poissonian?
The abstract: Yes.
The claim in Gardner and Knopoff (1974) is based on
a chi-square test described in section 3.1. The assumptions
of the chi-square test fail when seismicity really does follow
a SITHP, casting some doubt on the conclusion. Moreover,
not rejecting the null hypothesis does not imply that the
null hypothesis is true: Failure to reject could be a Type II
error, especially if the test has little power against plausible
alternativeswhich we show to be the case. (And if declus-
tering removes enough events, no test can have much power:
The few remaining events will always pass a test for Poisson
behavior.)
The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test, described in sec-
tion 3.3, can be also used to test the hypothesis that declus-
tered seismicity follows a SITHP. Unlike the assumptions of
the chi-square test, the assumptions of the KS test are sat-
isfied when declustered seismicity actually follows a SITHP.
2 B. Luen and P.B. Stark
The KS test does not have good power against every alterna-
tive, but it has better power than the chi-square test against
some kinds of clustering. The KS test finds small P -values
for the hypothesis that the 19321971 Southern California
Earthquake Center (SCSC) catalog of events with magni-
tude 3.8 and above, declustered with four methods, follow a
SITHP.
The chi-square and KS tests use only the times of
events, not event locations. Section 4 gives an abstract non-
parametric permutation test that uses locations as well as
times to test the hypothesis that event times in declustered
catalogs are conditionally exchangeable given event loca-
tions, a hypothesis implied by the hypothesis that declus-
tered catalogs are a realization of a SITHP. The test, based
on ideas in Romano (1988, 1989), finds small P -values for
this weaker hypothesis, again using the 19321971 SCEC
catalog declustered in four ways. We believe this test is new
to seismology.
We study only main-shock window and linked-window
declustering methods. There are also stochastic declustering
methods, which use chance to decide whether to remove a
particular event (Zhuang et al. 2002; Vere-Jones 1970); the
waveform similarity approach (Barani et al. 2007); and
others. See Davis and Frohlich (1991) and Zhuang et al.
(2002) for taxonomies.
Main-shock window methods remove the earthquakes
in a space-time window around every main shock, suit-
ably defined. Main-shock window methods can be thought
of as punching a hole in the catalog after each main
shock. The hole is the window. Gardner and Knopoffs win-
dows (Knopoff and Gardner 1972; Gardner and Knopoff
1974) are common in main-shock declustering. They are
larger in space and time the larger the shock is.
Linked-window methods calculate a space-time window
for every event in the catalog, not just main shocks. In
linked-window methods, an event is in a cluster if and only
if it falls within the window of at least one other event in
that cluster. Linked-window declustering replaces each clus-
ter with a single eventfor instance, the first, the largest, or
an equivalent event. The most widely used linked-window
method is Reasenbergs (Reasenberg 1985). Reasenbergs
windows are larger in space but shorter in time the larger
the shock is.
Below, we examine temporal and spatio-temporal tests
of the hypotheses that the 19321971 SCEC catalog of
events with magnitude 3.8 and above, declustered using four
main-shock window and linked-window methods, follows
a temporally homogeneous, spatially heterogenous Poisson
process. The resulting P -values are generally quite small:
The declustered catalogs are not statistically compatible
with SITHP models.
2 THE POISSON NULL HYPOTHESIS
Suppose that the declustered catalog has n events. The lon-
gitude, latitude, and time of the ith event is (xi , yi , ti ),
i = 1, . . . , n. Events are not necessarily in chronological or-
der. We do not consider earthquake depths. We study the
null hypothesis that the points {(xi , yi , ti )}ni=1 are a real-
ization of a SITHP on spatial domain S and time interval
(0, T ], where S and T are fixed.
In a SITHP, event locations are independent of event
times, so the space-time rate is the product of the marginal
spatial rate and the uniform temporal rate. The total num-
ber of events, N , is random. We denote the random loca-
tions and times of the N events by {(Xi , Yi , Ti )}N i=1 . The
times between successive events are (marginally) indepen-
dent and identically distributed (iid) exponential random
variables. The number of events in disjoint time intervals
are independent Poisson random variables with means pro-
portional to the durations of the intervals; this is the basis of
the chi-square test described in section 3.1. Conditional on
N = n, the times {Ti }n i=1 are (marginally) iid uniform ran-
dom variables; this is the basis of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov
test described in section 3.3.
3 TEMPORAL TESTS
3.1 The Chi-square test
We believe that the test of the hypothesis that declustered
catalogs are realizations of a homogeneous temporal Poisson
process used by Gardner and Knopoff (1974) and Barani
et al. (2007) works as follows:
(i) Pick K 1. Partition the study period into K time
intervals of length T /K. Count the events in each interval:
Nk #{i : ti ((k 1)T /K, kT /K]}, k {1, . . . , K}.
(1)
(ii) Pick C 2, the number of categories. For k
{1, . . . , K}, interval k is in category c {0, . . . , C 2} if
it contains c events; interval k is in category C 1 if it
contains C 1 or more events. Let Oc be the number of
intervals observed to be in category c.
(iii) Estimate the theoretical rate of events per interval.
We believe Gardner and Knopoff (1974); Barani et al. (2007)
used the estimate
= n/K. (2)
(iv) Calculate the expected number of intervals in cate-
gory c on the assumption that events follow a Poisson pro-
cess with rate :
( c
Ke c! , c = 0, 1, . . . , C 2
Ec PC2 (3)
K j=0 Ej , c = C 1.
(v) Calculate the chi-square statistic:
C1
X (Oc Ec )2
2 . (4)
c=0
Ec
Take the nominal P -value to be
P Pr{X 2 }, (5)
where X is a random variable with a chi-square distribution
with d degrees of freedom.
The nominal and true P -values depend on the arbitrary
choices K and C, on d, and on the method of estimating
.

3.2 Does the chi-square approximation hold?
Let Ik = c if the number of events in the kth interval is
in category c. In the basic chi-square test for goodness of
C1
fit, the null hypothesis is that (i) {Pr{Ik = c}}c=0
K
known and do not depend on k, and (ii) {Ik }k=1 are in-
Are declustered earthquake catalogs Poisson? 3
3.3 The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test
The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test compares the empirical
cumulative distribution function Fn (x) of a random variable
are to a fixed reference distribution function F (x) (Lehmann
2005). The KS test rejects when
dependent (Lehmann 2005). The numbers of data in the  
C categories, {Oc }C1 Dn sup Fn (x) F (x) C(n, ). (7)

c=0 , then have a multinomial joint dis-
tribution. The null distribution of the chi-square statistic
converges to a chi-square distribution with C 1 degrees of
freedom as the number K of data increasesbut the finite-
sample distribution is only approximately chi-squared.
Neither (i) nor (ii) is true in testing whether declus-
tered catalogs are Poisson. (i) is false because the hypothe-
sis that declustered seismicity is Poisson does not completely
specify the category probabilities {Pr{Ik = c}}C1
c=0 . Instead,
those probabilities are estimated from an estimate of the
marginal temporal rate of the Poisson process. Estimating
{Pr{Ik = c}}C1 c=0 from the data changes the distribution of
the chi-square statistic.
(ii) is false too: Conditional on the estimated tempo-
ral rate, the random variables {Ik }K k=1 are not indepen-
dent because they are related through the total number of
x
According to the Massart-Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz in-
equality (Massart 1990), if we take
r
ln
C(n, ) = , (8)
2n
the significance level of the resulting test is at most . In
seismology, the KS test has been used to assess the unifor-
mity of declustered earthquake sequences preceding main
shocks (Matthews and Reasenberg 1988; Reasenberg and
Matthews 1988).
If declustered earthquakes follow a SITHP, then con-
ditional on N = n the times {Ti }n i=1 are iid uniform on
(0, T ]. Their common cumulative distribution function is
F (x) = t/T . Hence, conditional on n,
earthquakesan ingredient in estimating the rate. For in-  
n
stance, if n C 1 and Ik = 0, k = 1, . . . , K 1, we 1
 X 
Dn = sup  1ti t t . (9)

would know that IK = C 1. Hence, the joint distribu-
tion of {Oc }C1c=0 is not multinomial when the Poisson null
hypothesis is true.
When the category probabilities Pr{Ik = c}C1
c=0 de-
pend on p parameters and those parameters are estimated
from {Oc } using an efficient maximum likelihood estima-
tor (MLE), asymptotically the chi-square statistic has a
chi-square distribution with B p 1 degrees of free-
dom (Lehmann 2005). The MLE ML of from {Oc } solves
P The chi-square test has low power against some kinds of
iML /i!
PC2
c=0 bOc i=C2
+ P OC1 = K. (6)
ML j=C1 jML /j!
The estimate = n/K is not a function of the counts {Oc }
alone. Depending on the data, differences between ML and
can be minor (the estimates are identical if OC1 = 0), but
we know of no guarantee that the asymptotic distribution
of the chi-square statistic based on is chi-square.
To assess the chi-square approximation to the distribu-
tion of the chi-square statistic when the Poisson null hy-
pothesis is true and is estimated using the naive estimator
, we simulated 106 independent realizations of a tempo-
ral rate 1 Poisson process for 500 time intervals of length
one, then counted the number of intervals with 0, 1, 2, or
more than 2 events. We estimated the rate to be = n/K
and performed a chi-square test with C = 4 categories at
nominal significance level = 5% for each realization.
Using the 5% critical value of the chi-square distribution
with 2 degrees of freedom led to rejecting the null hypoth-
esis 5.01% of the time. Using the 5% critical value of the
chi-square distribution with 3 degrees of freedom led to re-
jecting the null hypothesis only 2.02% of the time. Similar
tests with different rates and different numbers of categories
suggest that setting the degrees of freedom to C 2 gives a
better approximation to the true significance level when
is estimated by = n/K.
t n 
i=1
Unlike the chi-square test, the KS test has no ad hoc choices
analogous to K, C, d and . The KS test has asymptotic
power 1 against the alternative that the data are iid with
any fixed distribution G 6= F .
3.4 Power
clustering that violate the Poisson hypothesis. To see why,
suppose all the intervals with events occur at the beginning
of the study period. This would be very unlikely if declus-
tered seismicity followed a homogeneous Poisson process.
However, the chi-square test is insensitive to the order of
the intervalsit depends only on {Oc }C1 c=1 , the numbers of
intervals with 0 events, 1 event, etc. Despite the long-term
variation in the rate of seismicity, the test will not reject if Oc
is close to Ec for all c. The KS test tends to be more sensitive
to long-term rate variations, but less sensitive to departures
from exponential inter-event times. (Neither the chi-square
test nor the KS test uses the spatial locations of the events.
A process can be non-Poisson in space-time yet have a Pois-
son marginal temporal distribution; see, e.g., Luen (2010,
Chapter 3).)
To illustrate the complementary limitations of the chi-
square and KS tests, we estimated the power of significance
level-0.05 chi-square and KS tests against the alternatives
that seismicity follows a inhomogeneous Poisson process or a
gamma renewal process, using 10,000 forty-year simulations
of each process. (We chose 40 years to match the lengths
of the actual catalogs used below.) The chi-square test used
ten-day intervals and four categories. Table 1 shows the re-
sults.
In the inhomogeneous Poisson process, the expected
rate is 0.25 events per ten days for the first twenty years
and 0.5 events per ten days for the next twenty yearsa
4 B. Luen and P.B. Stark
Process KS Chi-square
Inhomogeneous Poisson 1 0.1658
Gamma renewal 0.0009 1 chi-square tests on a number of catalogs declustered using
Table 1. Estimated power of significance level 0.05 tests that
two temporal point processes are homogeneous Poisson processes,
based on 10,000 40-year simulations of each process. In the In-
homogeneous Poisson process, events occur at expected rate
0.25 per ten days for twenty years, then at expected rate 0.5 per
ten days for another twenty years. In the Gamma renewal
process, the times between events are independent and follow
a gamma distribution with shape 2 and rate 1. The KS test is
described in section 3.3. The chi-square test, which uses ten-day
intervals, C = 4 categories, and d = C 2 = 2 degrees of free-
dom, is described in section 3.1. For the inhomogeneous Poisson
process, the KS test rejects in all simulations and the chi-square
test usually does not reject. For the gamma renewal process, the
chi-square test rejects in all simulations and the KS test rarely
rejects.
clear departure from temporally homogeneous Poisson be-
havior. The KS test rejected in all 10,000 simulations. But
the chi-square test rejected in only 1658 of the 10,000 sim-
ulations: It has little power because it ignores the order of
the intervals.
In the gamma renewal process, inter-event times are in-
dependent with a Gamma(2, 1) distribution (the time unit
is ten days). The expected rate is constant, but the distri-
bution of inter-event times is not exponential, as it would
be in a homogeneous Poisson process. The chi-square test
rejected in all 10,000 simulations: More intervals have one
event and fewer have two or more events than would be ex-
pected if the process were Poisson. The KS test rejected in
only 9 of the 10,000 simulations.
The KS test is sensitive to rate variations across the
study period, but not to local departures from exponential
inter-event times. The chi-square test is sensitive to depar-
tures from exponential inter-event times in short intervals,
but not to long-term rate variations. Neither test uses spa-
tial information, which we address in section 4.
3.5 Tests on declustered catalogs
We consider the following four window-based declustering
algorithms:
Method 1: Variant (a) Remove every event that is
in the window of some other event (Gardner and Knopoff
1974). Variant (b) Divide the catalog into clusters as follows:
An event is in a given cluster if and only if it is in the window
of at least one other event in the cluster. In every cluster,
remove all events except the largest (Gardner and Knopoff
1974).
Method 2: Consider the events in chronological order.
If the ith event is in the window of a preceding larger shock
that has not already been deleted, delete it. If a larger shock
is in the window of the ith event, delete the ith event. Oth-
erwise, retain the ith event (Knopoff and Gardner 1972).
Method 3: Reasenbergs method (Reasenberg 1985).
Methods 1a, 1b, and 3 are linked-window methods. Gardner
and Knopoff (1974) found that methods 1a and 1b gave sim-
ilar results for 19321971 Southern California seismicity for
their windows. Method 2 is a main-shock window method.
Gardner and Knopoff (1974) performed a variety of
Method 1a. Among other things, they report results for a
catalog of earthquakes with magnitude at least 3.8 occurring
in the Southern California Local Area from 19321971.
That raw catalog had 1,751 events; the declustered catalog
had 503 events. They divided the forty-year period into ten-
day intervals, found Oc and estimated Ec for some range of
c, and compared the chi-square statistic to a chi-square dis-
tribution with 2 degrees of freedom. They did not state C,
how they estimated , nor whether they used d = C 1 or
d = C 2 in their tests. They found a P -value of 0.0599 and
hence did not reject the hypothesis that declustered catalogs
are Poisson.
We do not have the catalog used by Gardner and
Knopoff (1974), so we used the SCEC catalog? for the same
time period, covering approximately the same region. The
SCEC catalog contained 1,556 events with magnitude at
least 3.8 between 1932 and 1971. We declustered the cat-
alog using Methods 1a, 1b, and 2 with the Gardner and
Knopoff (1974) windows and using Method 3. (We used
Stefan Wiemers ZMAP package for MATLAB to apply
Reasenbergs method.) The declustered catalogs contained
437, 424, 544, and 985 events, respectively. Figure 1 maps
the events in the original catalog and the events that remain
after declustering using methods 1b, 2, and 3. The maps for
methods 1a and 1b are visually indistinguishable.
We tested the SITHP hypothesis using the KS test and
the chi-square test with C = 4 and d = C 2 = 2. We
rejected the null hypothesis if the KS test had a P -value
less than 0.025 or the chi-square test had a nominal P -value
less than 0.025. If the null hypothesis is true, the chance of a
Type I error is no greater than 0.05, by Bonferronis inequal-
ity (ignoring the difference between the nominal and true P -
value for the chi-square test). We also compared chi-square
tests using = n/k to tests that estimate by solving (6);
differences were negligible. Table 2 shows the results. None of
the declustered catalogs appears to be Poisson, contradict-
ing Gardner and Knopoff (1974). For all four declustering
methods, the KS test rejects the Poisson hypothesis at level
0.025. The chi-square test rejects at nominal level 0.025 for
methods 2 and 3.
4 SPATIO-TEMPORAL TESTS
4.1 A weaker null hypothesis: conditionally
exchangeable times
The KS test rejects the hypothesis that the marginal distri-
bution of times in the declustered SCEC catalogs is Poisson.
The marginal distribution of times for a SITHP is Poisson.
Hence the test in the previous section also rejects the hy-
pothesis that declustered 19321971 SCEC catalogs are a
realizations of a SITHP.
? http://www.data.scec.org/catalog_search/data_mag_loc.
php
http://www.earthquake.ethz.ch/software/zmap

(a)
(c)
Figure 1. (a): 19321971 SCEC catalog of 1,556 events of magnitude 3.8 or greater in Southern California. (b): The 424 events that
remain after declustering using method 1b. (c): The 544 events that remain after declustering using method 2. (d): The 985 events that
remain after declustering using method 3.
Moreover, SITHPs can have events arbitrarily close to-
gether. But catalogs declustered with window methods have
a minimum spacing between events: If a catalog contains two
events very close in space and time, the later event will fall
within the window of the former, and one or both of them
will be deleted. Hence, catalogs declustered using window
methods cannot be realizations of SITHPs.
To try to salvage part of the SITHP hypothesis, we test
a much weaker condition implied by SITHP: the hypothesis
that times are conditionally exchangeable given event loca-
tions. Let be the set of all n! permutations of {1, . . . , n}.
We say a process has conditionally exchangeable times if,
conditional on the locations,
d
{T1 , . . . , Tn } = {T(1) , . . . , T(n) } (10)
d
for all permutations . (The notation = means has
the same probability distribution as.) If event times are
conditionally iid given event locations, they are condition-
Are declustered earthquake catalogs Poisson? 5
(b)
(d)
ally exchangeable given event locations. Since event times in
SITHPs are conditionally iid uniform given event locations,
SITHPs have conditionally exchangeable times given event
locations.
Under the hypothesis of conditionally exchangeable
times, given the set of locations {(xi , yi )} and (separately)
the set of times {ti }, all one-to-one assignments of times
to locations have the same chance. If events close in space
tend to be close in timethe kind of clustering real seis-
micity exhibitstimes are not conditionally exchangeable.
If events close in space tend to be distant in timewhich
can result from deleting events in windowstimes are not
conditionally exchangeable.
We test the hypothesis that times are conditionally
exchangeable by adapting abstract methodology developed
by Romano (1988, 1989). Let Pn be the empirical distribu-
tion of the times and locations of the n observed events. Let
Pn be the distribution that has equal mass at every ele-
6 B. Luen and P.B. Stark
Chi-square
Method n KS Plug-in MLE Reject?
1a 437 0.012 0.087 0.087 Yes
1b 424 0.006 0.297 0.295 Yes
2 544 0.022 < 0.001 < 0.001 Yes
3 985 0.003 0.000 0.000 Yes
Table 2. P -values for tests of the null hypotheses that the 1932
1971 SCEC catalog of 1,556 events with magnitude 3.8 or larger,
declustered using Methods 1a, 1b, 2, and 3 of section 3.5, has a
homogeneous Poisson distribution in time. The number of events
that remain after declustering is n. KS is an upper bound on the
P -value for the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Chi-square plug-in
is the nominal P -value for a chi-square test that estimates by
n/K. Chi-Square MLE is the nominal P -value for a chi-square
test that estimates by maximum likelihood from the category
counts using equation (6). Reject is yes if the P -value for the
KS test or the nominal P -value for the chi-square test is less than
0.025.
ment of the orbit of the data under the permutation group
(permuting times relative to the locations).
A set V R3 is a lower-left quadrant if, for some
(x0 , y0 , t0 ), it is of the form:
V = {(x, y, t) R3 : x x0 and y y0 and t t0 }. (11)
Let V be the set of all lower-left quadrants. The test statistic
is the supremum (over all lower-left quadrants V V) of
the difference between the probability Pn assigns to V and
the probability that Pn assigns to V :
(Pn ) sup |Pn (V ) ( Pn )(V )|. (12)
V V
The P -value is the fraction of elements of the orbit (permu-
tations) for which the test statistic is at least as large as it is
for the actual data. Since the total number of permutations
is large, in practice, the P -value is estimated from a ran-
dom sample of permutations. (Alternatively, the test can be
defined in terms of a deterministic or random subset of the
permutations; the resulting test will still have level but its
power might suffer.)
We implemented a test for conditionally exchangeable
times in R (http://cran.r-project.org/). Code is avail-
able online at http://statistics.berkeley.edu/~stark/
Code/Quake/permutest.r. Appendix A describes the algo-
rithm. Table 3 shows the P -values that result from apply-
ing the test to the 19321971 SCEC catalog of events with
magnitude 3.8 or above, declustered using the four meth-
ods described in section 3.5. The evidence is quite strong
that times are not conditionally exchangeable for methods
1a, 1b, and 3. The evidence that times are not conditionally
exchangeable for method 2 is somewhat weaker.
5 DISCUSSION
The chi-square test others have used to assess whether
declustered catalogs fit SITHP models relies on ad hoc
tuning constants, lacks theoretical justification, can have a
significance level larger than its nominal significance level,
and has low power against many plausible alternatives. A
Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test for the same hypothesis has
Method n P -value CI Reject?
1a 437 0.005 [0.003, 0.007] Yes
1b 424 0.000 [0.000, 0.001] Yes
2 544 0.069 [0.063, 0.076] No
3 985 0.000 [0.000, 0.001] Yes
Table 3. P -values for tests of the null hypotheses that the 1932
1971 SCEC catalog of 1,556 events with magnitude 3.8 or larger,
declustered using Methods 1a, 1b, 2, and 3 of section 3.5, have
conditionally exchangeable times given the locations of the events.
The number of events that remain after declustering is n. The
P -values are estimated from 10, 000 random permutations. CI
is a 99% confidence interval for the P -value that would result
from examining all permutations instead of a random sample of
permutations.
no ad hoc tuning constants, is guaranteed to be conserva-
tive, and has more power against many alternatives. Both
the chi-square test and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test con-
dition on the total number of events. The KS test shows
that that declustering the 19321971 SCEC catalog of events
of magnitude 3.8 and above using main-shock window or
linked-window methods does not leave a set of events that
looks like a realization of a homogeneous Poisson process:
P -values range from 0.006 to 0.022 for the four declustering
methods we consider.
Neither the chi-square test nor the KS test takes spatial
locations into account. In a spatially inhomogeneous, tem-
porally homogeneous Poisson process (SITHP), two events
may occur arbitrarily close to one another with strictly posi-
tive probability. Catalogs declustered using window methods
never have events very close in space and time, so they can-
not be realizations of SITHP. But declustered catalogs may
still have properties in common with SITHP. For instance,
the times might be conditionally exchangeable given the lo-
cations: Knowing the location of an event might give no
information about the time of the event, given (separately)
the times of all the events and the locations of all the events.
We tested the hypothesis that times of events in declus-
tered catalogs are conditionally exchangeable given the lo-
cations using a permutation test. For the 19321971 SCEC
catalog of events with magnitude 3.8 or greater declustered
using Gardner-Knopoff windows applied as a linked-window
method or Reasenbergs method, one-tailed P -values were
estimated to be 0.005 or below. The one-tailed P -value us-
ing Gardner-Knopoff windows applied as a main-shock win-
dow method was estimated to be 0.069: larger than for the
other methodsand above 0.05but still small. Declus-
tered catalogs do not appear to be conditionally exchange-
able, much less consistent with SITHP. The ordering of
the P -values suggests that Reasenbergs method might re-
move too few events and linked-window declustering using
Gardner-Knopoff windows might remove too many events.
Of course, by removing almost all the events, the P -value
can be made arbitrarily close to 1.
Ok, so why do you decluster the catalog? asks the
online FAQ for the Earthquake Probability Mapping Appli-
 Are declustered earthquake catalogs Poisson? 7
cation of the USGS. The answers: to get the best possible finds the distances for quadrants with corners (xj , yi , tk ) for
estimate for the rate of mainshocks, and the methodol- every value of k successively; that is, it finds
ogy [of the Earthquake Probability Mapping Application]   
requires a catalog of independent events (Poisson model), = max max P (V (j, i, k)) ( P )(V (j, i, k)) ,

and declustering helps to achieve independence. The evi-
dence presented here suggests that declustered catalogs do
not consist of independent events that follow a Poisson
model.
To estimate the rate of main shocks presumes an un-
ambiguous definition of main shock. Often, main shocks
are taken to be the events that remain after a catalog is
declusteredessentially a circular definition. And different
methods will produce different declustered catalogs. Rather
than try to identify main shocks, it might be better to model
all large events. As the USGS FAQ also notes, large fore-
shocks and aftershocks can do just as much damage as main
shocks. Removing them from the catalog will neither avert
nor repair the damage.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful to Steven N. Evans for instructive and help-
ful conversations.
APPENDIX A: ALGORITHM TO TEST THE
HYPOTHESIS THAT TIMES ARE
CONDITIONALLY EXCHANGEABLE
R code that implements the algorithm to test whether
times are conditionally exchangeable is available
at http://statistics.berkeley/edu/~stark/Code/
Quake/permutest.r. The algorithm has the following steps:
(i) Sort the catalog of longitudes, latitudes, and times
in time order. Label the sorted points {xi , yi , ti } for i
{1, . . . , n}. Find the longitude and latitude ranks of every
event.
(ii) Find the empirical spatial measure for all lower-left
quadrants in R2 with corners
(yi , xj ), 1 i, j n. (A.1)
In the online R code, this spatial distribution is stored in
the matrix xy.upper. The entry indexed by (i, j) is
n
1X
1(yi y, xj x). (A.2)
n i=1
This is the number of events in the catalog with latitude
less than the latitude of the ith event in the catalog and
with longitude less than the longitude of the jth event in
the catalog.
(iii) Find the absolute differences between the empirical
measure and the empirical null measure for the n3 lower-left
quadrants with corners
(xj , yi , tk ), i, j, k {1, . . . , n}.
Find the maximum value of all these differences; this is the
test statistic . To reduce storage requirements, the code
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/faq/?faqID=280, last ac-
cessed 29 January 2011.
k j,i
where V (j, i, k) is the lower-left quadrant with corner
(xj , yi , tk ).
(iv) Set the iteration counter h to 0.
(v) Increment h. Create a random permutation of
{1, . . . , n}. Apply this permutation to the locations, leav-
ing times fixed. (One could permute the times instead of
the locations, but that would require the re-sorting the cat-
alog into temporal order after each permutation.) The spa-
tial measure has not changed, but its indexing has; apply the
permutation to both the rows and the columns of xy.upper.
(vi) As in step iii, find the absolute differences between
the empirical measure and the empirical null measure for
the n3 lower-left quadrants. Let h be the maximum value
of all these distances.
(vii) Determine whether to stop or to return to step v.
(We might simply stop when h = 10, 000, or we might apply
Walds sequential probability ratio test (Wald 1945) to de-
termine whether, on the basis of the random permutations
taken so far, it is possible to conclude whether P .) If
the algorithm stops, estimate the P -value as
1
P = #{h : h },
H
where H is the total number of iterations.
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