Preface to the Focus Section on Machine Learning in Seismology

Abstract

Machine learning (ML) is a collection of algorithms and statistical models that enable computers to extract relevant patterns and information from large data sets. Unlike physical modeling approaches, in which scientists develop theories based on physical laws to compare with real–world observations, ML approaches learn directly from data without explicitly reasoning about the underlying physical mechanisms. ML algorithms are often categorized into supervised and unsupervised learning (see fig. 2 in Kong et al., 2018). Supervised learning algorithms build a model from existing labeled input data with the goal of predicting the labels of new data.