Predicting Earthquake Magnitudes in Indonesia: Exploring the Potential of the Prophet Algorithm

Abstract

Research on earthquakes has been extensively conducted by previous studies using various methods and specific discussions. Similarly, research to predict the magnitude of earthquakes that will occur in the future has also been conducted. This study employs the Prophet algorithm to test its capability in predicting a case study's magnitude using data with numerous missing values and outliers. The study is conducted without transformation and with Box-Cox and log-transformations. Transformations are applied to handle outliers. The results indicate that across the three experiments, the difference between the predicted and actual data ranges from 0.1 to 0.5 or even more. Performance metrics reveal that the log-transform is superior to the other two experiments, with a smaller MAE of 0.27 and a MAPE of 5.96%. Nevertheless, the use of the Prophet algorithm in this case study needs further investigation with different treatments to achieve more accurate results.