Geophysical Journal International

Geophys. J. Int. (2018) 212, 88–102 doi: 10.1093/gji/ggx420

Advance Access publication 2017 September 27
GJI Seismology

Automatic microseismic event picking via unsupervised

machine learning

Yangkang Chen∗

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Bureau of Economic Geology, John A. and Katherine G. Jackson School of Geosciences, The University of Texas at Austin, University Station, Austin,
TX 78713-8924, USA. E-mail: chenyk2016@gmail.com

Accepted 2017 September 26. Received 2017 September 25; in original form 2017 August 21

SUMMARY
Effective and efficient arrival picking plays an important role in microseismic and earth-
quake data processing and imaging. Widely used short-term-average long-term-average ratio
(STA/LTA) based arrival picking algorithms suffer from the sensitivity to moderate-to-strong
random ambient noise. To make the state-of-the-art arrival picking approaches effective, mi-
croseismic data need to be first pre-processed, for example, removing sufficient amount of
noise, and second analysed by arrival pickers. To conquer the noise issue in arrival picking for
weak microseismic or earthquake event, I leverage the machine learning techniques to help rec-
ognizing seismic waveforms in microseismic or earthquake data. Because of the dependency
of supervised machine learning algorithm on large volume of well-designed training data, I
utilize an unsupervised machine learning algorithm to help cluster the time samples into two
groups, that is, waveform points and non-waveform points. The fuzzy clustering algorithm has
been demonstrated to be effective for such purpose. A group of synthetic, real microseismic
and earthquake data sets with different levels of complexity show that the proposed method is
much more robust than the state-of-the-art STA/LTA method in picking microseismic events,
even in the case of moderately strong background noise.
Key words: Inverse theory; Time-series analysis; Earthquake source observations.

duce the dependency on user and decrease incorrect picking caused

I N T RO D U C T I O N
Strong noise in microseismic data, especially in surface micro-
seismic data, may impede the effective usage of the microseis-
mic signals for subsurface characterization and monitoring, for
example, hydraulic fracturing monitoring (Rodriguez et al. 2012;
Sabbione & Sacchi 2015; Mousavi & Langston 2016c, 2017; Huang
et al. 2017b,e). The determination of waveform arrival times is im-
portant for a variety of seismological applications including earth-
quake detection and seismic tomography (Bogiatzis & Ishii 2015).
First arrivals can be identified on the seismograms by conventional
picking, but these types of manual methods depend on external fac-
tors like the scale and quality of the seismic data, amplitude ratio,
sensitivity of the picking cursor and user experience (Senkaya &
Karsli 2014). An automatic arrival picking method is always pre-
ferred in the community.
Hatherly (1982) designed a technique to accurately determine
first arrival times by considering both the first kick and the first in-
flection point on each trace based on some statistic criteria. Senkaya
& Karsli (2014) proposed a semi-automatic arrival picking method
based on the cross-correlation technique (CCT). The CCT can re-
∗Now at: National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, One Bethel Valley Road, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6008, USA.
by environmental noise, displaying characteristics and scaling fac-
tors. Waveform correlation of strong events is a typical way to
detect weak events in the earthquake seismology community, which
is sensitive to small-amplitude events (Song et al. 2010). Accord-
ing to the study of many researchers, the waveform correlation
based detection methods can be effective as long as the separa-
tion between the master event and the target event is less than
the dominant wavelength (Gibbons & Ringdal 2006; Michelet &
Toksöz 2007; Arrowsmith & Eisner 2006). Song et al. (2010) ap-
plied the correlation-based weak event detection method to micro-
seismic events caused by hydraulic fracturing. In this method, a
master event with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is selected and
then is used to cross-correlate with a weak event to find those events
with the similar location, fault mechanism, and propagation path as
the master event (Eisner et al. 2006). They improved the traditional
short-term-average long-term-average ratio (STA/LTA) algorithm
(Allen 1978; Vaezi & Van der Baan 2015), which is very sensitive
to background noise level (Withers et al. 1998; Kalkan 2016), by
transforming the time-domain data to the spectrogram domain to
better identify P- and S-wave arrivals (Gibbons et al. 2006; Song
et al. 2010). Gelchinsky & Shtivelman (1983) proposed a hybrid
method that combines the benefits of both correlation-based meth-
ods and the statistics based methods. Sabbione & Velis (2010) pro-
posed a mispick-correcting technique to exploit the benefits of the

88 
C The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society.

data present in the entire shot record, which allows us to adjust the
trace-by-trace picks and to discard picks associated with bad or dead
traces. Velis et al. (2015) utilized pattern recognition techniques to
detect waveforms from microseismic data and used reduced-rank
filtering approach to improve the SNR of the waveforms.
Coppens (1985) proposed a fully automatic method to pick first
arrivals that makes use of the delay-time method in order to com-
pute static corrections at each shot position. From the automatically
picked first arrivals on common-offset gathers, the delay times,
weathering and subweathering velocities can be easily determined.
Murat & Rudman (1992) applied back-propagation neural network
to pick first arrivals (first breaks) in a background of noise. The
back-propagation neural network is used to decide whether each
half-cycle on the trace is the first arrival or not. The four attributes
used as the features for the neural network are (1) peak amplitude
of a half-cycle; (2) amplitude difference between the peak value of
the half-cycle and the previous (or following) half-cycle; (3) root
mean square (RMS) amplitude ratio for a data window (0.3 s) be-
fore and after the half-cycle; (4) RMS amplitude ratio for a data
window (0.06 s) on adjacent traces. Zhang et al. (2003) developed
an automatic P-wave arrival detection and picking algorithm based
on the wavelet transform and Akaike information criteria (AIC)
picker. They applied the discrete wavelet transform to seismograms
based on a local-window strategy (Zu et al. 2017). In each local
time-window, AIC autopicker is applied to the thresholded abso-
lute wavelet coefficients at different scales, and the consistency of
those picks in different scales is evaluated to determine whether
a P-wave arrival has been detected in the given local window.
Bogiatzis & Ishii (2015) proposed an algorithm for determining P-
and S-wave arrival times based on continuous wavelet transform of
the waveforms. The wavelet transform is well known for its superb
performance in analysing nonstationary signals because its basis
functions are localized in time and frequency. The wavelet coeffi-
cients are calculated using the vertical component for determining
P-wave arrivals and polarization of the shear waves is utilized to
cross examine the wavelet coefficients in horizontal components for
determining S-wave arrivals.
Because of the small magnitude of microseismic events and noisy
borehole or surface recording environment, the microseismic sig-
nals may often be neglected if no proper denoising algorithms
or event detection techniques are applied (Mousavi et al. 2016;
Mousavi & Langston 2016a,b). The microseismic data can also
be denoised using multichannel methods, which are widely used
in the active-source seismic community. The state-of-the-art mul-
tichannel denoising algorithms include transform domain thresh-
olding methods (Candès et al. 2006; Chen et al. 2014; Chen 2016;
Gan et al. 2016a; Mousavi et al. 2016; Zu et al. 2016), predic-
tive filtering methods (Liu et al. 2012; Liu & Chen 2013), sin-
gular spectrum analysis (Vautard et al. 1992; Huang et al. 2016;
Chen et al. 2016a,b; Zhang et al. 2016, 2017; Huang et al. 2017c;
Siahsar et al. 2017c), low-rank approximation based methods (Xue
et al. 2016a; Chen et al. 2017; Huang et al. 2017a; Wang et al. 2017;
Xie et al. 2017; Zhou et al. 2017), dictionary learning based meth-
ods (Elad & Aharon 2006; Chen 2017; Siahsar et al. 2017b,a), and
mean/median filtering methods (Gan et al. 2016b; Xue et al. 2016b).
Forghani-Arani et al. (2013) proposed a technique for suppressing
noise in surface microseismic data based on the distinct character-
istics that microseismic signal and noise show in the τ − p domain.
Before separation in the τ − p domain, a scanning approach that
is similar to semblance analysis needs to be used to test all possi-
ble double-couple orientations to determine an estimated orientation
that best accounts for the polarity pattern of any microseismic events
Unsupervised machine learning 89
(Forghani-Arani et al. 2013). The multichannel denoising methods
rely on a fairly dense spatial sampling of the data. For most micro-
seismic monitoring projects, where the number of spatial geophones
is not large enough, the multichannel denoising methods are appli-
cable or cannot obtain acceptable results.
Han & van der Baan (2015) applied ensemble empirical mode
decomposition (EEMD) method combined with adaptive interval
thresholding strategy to denoise microseismic data. Empirical mode
decomposition (EMD) was developed by Huang et al. (1998) to
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adaptively decompose non-stationary and nonlinear signal into lo-
cally stationary components, which are called intrinsic mode func-
tions (IMF). The EMD is a quasi-orthogonal decomposition in that
the cross-correlation coefficients between different IMFs are close
to zero (Han & van der Baan 2015). Ensemble empirical mode de-
composition is an improved version of EMD in that it solves the
mode-mixing problem in EMD to some extent and has a better time-
frequency depicting performance than EMD (Wu & Huang 2009).
Inspired by the EMD method, Gómez & Velis (2016) proposed
a data-driven EMD-like algorithm to suppress noise either in mi-
croseismic data as a trace-by-trace process or in seismic data as a
f − x domain algorithm. The EMD-like algorithm is much more
computationally efficient than the EMD method and requires less
user intervention. However, because of the ‘empirical’ nature of
EMD, the EMD-related algorithms are not supported by a cer-
tain mathematical mode, and thus the performance of EMD based
methods cannot be well controlled. In a similar way as the EMD
based methods, Li et al. (2016a) developed a morphological de-
composition (Huang et al. 2017d) based method, which is much
faster than EMD, to remove low-frequency noise in microseismic
data. Li et al. (2016b) further designed a morphological decom-
position strategy for recovering the weak signals in microseismic
data. Other latest EMD-like data decomposition algorithms include
the variational mode decomposition (Liu et al. 2015, 2016b, 2017),
empirical wavelet transform (Gilles 2013; Liu et al. 2016a), and
regularized non-stationary autoregression (Fomel 2013; Wu et al.
2017).
Denoising microseismic data will inevitably cause signal dam-
ages to the useful signals, which degrades the fidelity of the pro-
cessed data (Chen & Fomel 2015). On the one hand, small-amplitude
signals may be neglected due to the signal damage and thus arrival
picking will be negatively affected. On the other hand, the dam-
aged waveform amplitude will greatly affect the subsequent source
mechanism inversion and microseismic based waveform inversion
(Maxwell et al. 2010; Song & Toksöz 2011). Considering the draw-
backs and potential pitfalls caused by denoising, a robust arrival
picking method without the need of pre-processing is strongly in
demand for the microseismic community.
In this paper, I propose a novel automatic microseismic arrival
picking method based on clustering. Clustering is a type of unsuper-
vised machine learning techniques, which allows us to classify the
given data by using the data itself. Unlike the supervised machine
learning techniques which heavily depend on the input training data
set, the unsupervised machine learning approaches (e.g. cluster-
ing) rely only on the data itself and thus is much more flexible.
More specifically, I demonstrate the use of the fuzzy clustering al-
gorithm (Yang et al. 2006) in arrival picking problem. Results from
a comprehensive analysis of a group of synthetic and real data sets
with different levels of complexity demonstrate the strong antinoise
ability of the proposed unsupervised machine learning algorithm in
picking first arrivals from raw noisy microseismic data. The effi-
ciency is also demonstrated to be acceptable and thus the method
can be readily applicable.
90 Y. Chen
Figure 1. Simple synthetic data for demonstrating clustering features. (a) Clean data. (b) Noisy data with SNR = −3.64 dB. The red circles in (a) and (b) are
the picked arrival indices.
I organize the paper as follows: I first give a brief introduction
of the concept of clustering analysis, and then I formulate the mi-
croseismic event picking problem as a clustering problem. Next, I
introduce the iterative solver for solving the fuzzy clustering prob-
lem. I then use a group of examples with comprehensive analysis and
discussion to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method
and compare the performance with the state-of-the-art STA/LTA
method. Finally, I draw some key conclusions in the end of the
paper.
T H E O RY
Clustering analysis
Clustering analysis is a type of unsupervised machine learning ap-
proach. The target of clustering analysis is to group the input data
into several clusters just according to the inherent features of the
input data set. The number of groups can be defined in advance ac-
cording to the purpose of a specific problem. Simply speaking, each
cluster after clustering analysis is a collection of objects which have
some sort of similarities which defer them from objects in the other
clusters. Clustering is driven only by the choice of input features
(or attributes) and the number of desired clusters and thus is much
more flexible than those supervised machine learning techniques
where a large amount of training data is required.
An important component of a clustering algorithm is the distance
measure between data points. If the components of the data instance
vectors are all in the same physical units then it is possible for the
simple Euclidean distance metric to be sufficient to successfully
group similar data instances. The following Minkowski Metric is a
common way for measuring distance for an N dimensional data
d(xi , x j ) =  xi − x j  p ,
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where d(xi , x j ) denotes the distance between xi and x j . xi de-
notes the ith N dimensional data point. xi and x j are both vectors.
 · p denotes p-norm of the input vector. The Euclidean distance
is a special case where p = 2, while Manhattan metric has p = 1.
However, there are no general theoretical guidelines for selecting a
measure for any given application.
Microseismic event picking as a clustering problem
A microseismic record can be classified as waveform and non-
waveform components. The first index of waveform components
can be treated as the arrival of the microseismic event. The essence
of the arrival picking problem is thus turned into a classification
problem given a group of data points. When a group of training
data is given together with predefined data features, the classification
problem can be viewed as a supervised classification problem (e.g.
binary classification). If one even wants to classify the microseismic
record using the data itself, the problem becomes a classic clustering
analysis problem.
The most important factor that affects the performance of the
clustering analysis is the selected feature vector. In the algorithm,
I propose three features to construct the feature vector, which are
mean, power, and STA/LTA. All these feature vectors are measured
in the time domain.
The three features are defined as follows:
(i) Mean M
1 
i+w
M(i) = d(i) (2)
N i−w
(ii) Power E

i+w
E(i) = d 2 (i) (3)
(1) i−w
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Figure 2. Predefined features of (a) clean data and (b) noisy data for clustering.

(iii) STA/LTA R w denotes half of window length. d(i) denotes the input seismic.
NSTA and NLTA denote short-term and long-term periods, respec-
tively.

i Fig. 1 shows a simple example for demonstrating the extracted
1
STA(i) = d( j) features. Fig. 1 contains two synthetic data in the clean and noisy
NSTA j=i−NSTA cases. The noisy data contains a large amount of noise that makes
the effective signals almost buried under the noise. The SNR of this
1 
i
LTA(i) = d( j) noisy data is −3.64 dB. The red circles in panels (a) and (b) are the
NLTA j=i−NLTA picked arrival indices using the presented algorithm. It is very clear
that in both cases, the presented algorithm obtains very success-
R(i) = STA(i)/LTA(i) (4) ful arrival picking results. Fig. 2 shows the three aforementioned
92 Y. Chen

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Figure 3. Calculated membership values of (a) clean data and (b) noisy data that define different clusters.

features used for clustering for clean data (Fig. 2a) and noisy data or more clusters with different degrees of membership. In this case,
(Fig. 2b). data will be associated with an appropriate membership value.
Fuzzy c-means is a method of clustering which allows one piece
of data to belong to two or more clusters (Dunn 1973; Bezdek 1981).
It is based on minimization of the following objective function
Fuzzy clustering

N 
C
Fuzzy clustering belongs to the type of overlapping clustering, and J= u i,m j  xi − c j 2 , 1 ≤ m ≤ ∞, (5)
uses fuzzy sets to cluster data, so that each point may belong to two i=1 j=1
 Unsupervised machine learning 93

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Figure 4. The geometry of the synthetic example.

where m is any real number greater than 1, ui, j is the degree of

membership of xi in the cluster j, xi is the ith of d-dimensional
measured data (d is the dimension of xi ), c j is the d-dimension
center of the cluster, and  ·  is any norm expressing the similarity
between any measured data and the center, for example, L2 norm.
C denotes the number of clusters or classes needed to be classified.
N denotes the length of the input signal. Note that both xi and c j
are vectors of the same dimension. The dimension of the vectors is
decided by the number of features. For example, in this paper, I use
mean, power, STA/LTA as the three features and thus the dimension
of both xi and c j is 3. Each xi is composed of the values of all
feature components at time index i.
Fuzzy partitioning is carried out through an iterative optimization
of the objective function shown above, with the update of member-
ship ui, j and the cluster centres c j by:
1
u i, j = C   m−1 , (6)

2
 xi − c j 
k=1
 xi − ck 
and

N Figure 5. Comparison of arrival picking results for clean data using the
u i,m j xi presented (a) and STA/LTA (b) methods.
i=1
cj = . (7)

N
u i,m j (iii) Update Uk , Uk + 1 using
i=1
1
(k+1) (k)
This iteration will stop when maxi, j {|u i, j − u i, j |} < , where  u i, j = C   . (9)

2

is a termination criterion between 0 and 1, whereas k is the iteration  xi − c j  m−1

step. This procedure converges to a local minimum or a saddle point k=1
 xi − ck 
of Jm .
The algorithm is composed of the following steps: (iv) If Uk + 1 − Uk  < , then STOP; otherwise return to step 2.

(i) Initialize U = [ui, j ] matrix, U0 Eq. (9) can be further derived as

(ii) At k-step: calculate the centres vectors C k = [c j ] with Uk
1
using u i, j = C   m−1

2
 xi − c j 

N
u i,m j · xi k=1
 xi − ck 
i=1
cj = . (8) 1

N
=
u i,m j C 
  m−1
2
2 1
i=1  xi − c j  m−1
k=1
 xi − ck 
94 Y. Chen

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Figure 6. Comparison of arrival picking results for noisy data using the Figure 7. Comparison of arrival picking results for denoised data using the
presented (a) and STA/LTA (b) methods. presented (a) and STA/LTA (b) methods.

2
 xi − c j − m−1 Via this criterion, one can automatically detect the microseismic
= C   m−1 event. In the DISCUSSION section, I give a brief discussion on

2
1 the implementation and parameter selection for the aforementioned
k=1
 xi − ck  algorithm.
2
 xi − c j − m−1
= . (10)

C
2 EXAMPLES
− m−1
 xi − ck 
k=1 To numerically evaluate the performance, I use the arrival picking
error metric which is defined as follows:
for easier implementation. The above iteration terminates either
when the maximum number of iteration (e.g. 100) is reached or when 
H

it is converged (e.g. Uk + 1 − Uk  < ). The obtained membership
vectors ui, j is then used to detect the microseismic event.
Fig. 3 shows the membership values calculated by iterative es-
timation for the data shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 3(a) corresponds to
the clean data and Fig. 3(b) corresponds to the noisy data. It
is clear from Fig. 3 that a microseismic arrival exists when the
membership value jumps from one to zero (or from zero to one).
Error = |I (h) − Î (h)|, (11)
h
where Error denotes the picking error measured in samples. I(h)
denotes the index corresponding to the exact first arrival for hth
trace in a multichannel 2-D microseismic record and Î (h) denotes
the picked arrival (index). The exact arrival is found by applying
the proposed method on clean synthetic data.

Figure 8. Arrival picking results using the proposed method for different input noise levels. (a) σ 2 = 0.1. (b) σ 2 = 0.2. (c) σ 2 = 0.3. (d) σ 2 = 0.4. (e) σ 2 = 0.5.
(f) σ 2 = 0.6.
I first use a multichannel synthetic data set to demonstrate the
performance of the proposed method. The microseismic data set
is simulated from the two-layer velocity model shown in Fig. 4.
The blue inverted triangles in the first layer denote the 50 evenly
spaced geophones for recording the microseismic signals. The blue
dots in the second layer denote the two microseismic sources. The
two sources are generated during the hydraulic fracturing process.
I use the acoustic wave to simulate the recorded data, as shown in
Fig. 5. Figs 5(a) and (b) show the clean microseismic data. The 50
Unsupervised machine learning 95
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spatial traces correspond to recorded data from 50 geophones. The
red circles in Fig. 5(a) correspond to the picked first arrivals for
this clean data set using the proposed clustering method. The blue
circles in Fig. 5(b) correspond to the picked first arrivals using the
STA/LTA method. From this clean data test, it is clear that both
clustering method and the STA/LTA method work well in detecting
the first arrivals when the SNR is very high. As a comparison, I
then conduct an experiment for noisy data. I simulate the noisy
data by adding some random noise with SNR = 0.24 dB. The
96 Y. Chen
Figure 9. Arrival picking results using the STA/LTA method for different input noise levels. (a) σ 2 = 0.1. (b) σ 2 = 0.2. (c) σ 2 = 0.3. (d) σ 2 = 0.4. (e)
σ 2 = 0.5. (f) σ 2 = 0.6.
arrival picking results are shown in Fig. 6. From Fig. 7(a), one can
see clearly that the red circles, which correspond to the proposed
method, successfully picked all the first arrivals without making any
mistake. While for the result by the traditional STA/LTA method,
as indicated by the blue circles in Fig. 7(b), most picked arrivals are
not correct. The noisy data example demonstrates that for noisy data
set, the proposed method can be robust to obtain acceptable arrival
picking results while the STA/LTA method cannot perform well. In
other words, the proposed method is not sensitive to noise while the
STA/LTA method is very sensitive to ambient random noise.
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To compare the arrival picking performance of the two methods
on raw noisy data is not exactly fair. In practice, the noisy data is
usually denoised first and then passed into the arrival picker. To
compare the performance of the two methods on denoised data, I
apply a multichannel denoising operator to the noisy data shown
in Fig. 6 to remove most of the noise. The multichannel denois-
ing operator I use is the damped multichannel singular spectrum
(DMSSA) algorithm, proposed by Huang et al. (2016). It is worth
noting that since for this example, the spatial sampling is dense and
the number of spatial traces is relatively high (50 in this case), one
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Figure 10. Error diagram with respect to input noise level. The right green
‘y’ axis shows the corresponding SNR for different input noise level. The
error is characterized by eq. (11).

can obtain a multichannel microseismic record with very coherent

events. Thus one can apply the multichannel denoising operator
to successfully remove most noise without damaging the useful
signals much. However, for most microseismic monitoring situa-
tions, the spatial sampling is not so optimal as in this synthetic test,
and multichannel denoising methods are not applicable. Instead, a
single-channel denoising operator is used to obtain a slightly worse
performance. Here I focus on the comparison of arrival picking
performance and neglect the denoising issue. As one can see from
Fig. 7, the denoised data is much cleaner than the noisy data shown
in Fig. 6. The proposed method, indicated by the red circles, suc-
cessfully picks those arrivals again but the STA/LTA method still
makes a lot of mistakes, as shown in Fig. 7(b) by the blue circles.
Although much better than the result of the noisy data, there are
still several traces where wrong arrivals are picked.
I then test the sensitivity of different methods to the noise level.
I create six different noisy data sets with different noise levels. I
increase the noise level by increasing the variance of Gaussian white
noise from σ 2 = 0.1 to σ 2 = 0.6, where σ 2 denotes noise variance.
The six noisy data sets with increasing noise level are shown in
Fig. 8. The red circles in each subfigure of Fig. 8 show the picked Figure 11. Comparison of arrival picking results for the real surface micro-
arrivals using the proposed clustering method. One can observe that seismic data using the presented (a) and STA/LTA (b) methods.
the proposed method is insensitive to the noise level. When the noise
variance is smaller than 0.6, the proposed method does not make corresponds to the SNRs of different data, which decreases from
obvious mistakes. The proposed method causes three obviously 8.21 dB when σ 2 = 0.1 to −7.35 dB when σ 2 = 0.6.
inaccurate picked arrivals until the noise variance is increased to For computational cost comparison, the traditional method takes
0.6. As a comparison, Fig. 9 shows arrival picking performance of 0.23 s for processing the data shown in Fig. 5(a) while the proposed
the STA/LTA method for the same six noisy data sets. It is quite algorithm takes 2.5 s. The data contains 351 samples and 50 traces.
clear that the STA/LTA method is very sensitive to the noise. Even The arrival picking algorithms are applied trace by trace. The com-
the noise variance is as small as σ 2 = 0.1, the STA/LTA method putation is done on a PC station equipped with an Intel Core i7
causes a lot of inaccurate picked arrivals. The performance becomes CPU clocked at 3.1 GHz and 16 GB of RAM. Thus, I conclude that
worse and worse when the noise variance is gradually increased. the proposed algorithm obtains a better performance at the expense
To numerically compare the performance, the picking error de- of a larger computational cost. Although the computational cost
fined in eq. (11) is calculated for each case and a diagram of arrival is roughly 10 times larger than the traditional algorithm, it is still
picking error with respect to noise level (measured by variance) acceptable in industrial applications, thus the computation should
is plotted for each individual method and is shown in Fig. 10. In not be a serious problem.
Fig. 10, the red line corresponds to the proposed method, which Fig. 11 shows the performance for the first field data example.
increases very slowly and is always less than 300 samples. The blue This is a surface-recorded microseismic data. The data quality is
line corresponds to the STA/LTA method, which is much larger relatively high and one can see the first arrivals caused by hydraulic
than the error of the proposed method. Even in the cleanest case, perforation very clearly. Fig. 11(a) shows the multichannel field
the picking error is very high (about 2000 samples). The green line data and the arrival picking results using the presented clustering
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Figure 12. Single trace comparison for presented and STA/LTA methods. (a) The 20th trace from the first field data and the picked result using clustering
method. (b) The 20th trace from the first field data and the picked result using STA/LTA method.

Figure 13. The three features exacted in the proposed method.

method. There are 40 receivers for this data set and the red circles
indicate the picked arrival indices. Fig. 11(b) shows the result from
the STA/LTA method. The performance of the proposed method is
very close to excellent except for one picking mistake, as shown in
the fourth trace in Fig. 11(a). Because the data quality of this data
is relatively high, the STA/LTA method obtains accurate picking
in some traces, but for most traces, the STA/LTA fails in picking
the accurate arrival. Note that in this test, I apply the two methods
directly to the raw microseismic data, so the performance of the
two methods demonstrates their relative robustnesses to noise. It is
worth mentioning that the STA/LTA method is usually implemented
after an initial denoising step is done on the raw data, where the
SNR becomes much better and more tolerable for the STA/LTA
method.
I extract the 20th trace in Fig. 11 for a single-trace comparison in
Fig. 12. Figs 12(a) and (b) show the results from the two methods,
where one can more clearly see the 1D waveform signals and the
difference in picked time indices. The three features, namely, Mean,
Power, and STA/LTA, are shown in Fig. 13 for the selected single
trace. It is very clear that the mean and power features are rela-
tively insensitive to noise since before 0.35s both mean and power
are almost zero. The STA/LTA, however, is much more sensitive to

Figure 14. The two groups of membership values calculated in the clustering analysis for 20th trace from the first field data.
Figure 15. Arrival picking results for the second real surface microseismic
data with extremely strong background noise using the presented method.
ambient noise as one can observe a lot of fake peaks in the STA/LTA
curve. The integrated clustering analysis over the two less noise-
insensitive features (i.e. mean and power) and a more noise-sensitive
feature (i.e. STA/LTA) through the fuzzy C-means framework ac-
counts for the anti-noise superiority of the presented method to the
traditional STA/LTA method. The two groups of membership val-
ues of the real single microseismic trace are shown in Fig. 14. A
distinct zero-to-one jump happens around 168 ms can be observed
from the top panel of Fig. 14.
I then show a more complicated real microseismic event. Fig. 15
shows the original record with the horizontal components H1
and H2, and the vertical component, respectively. Twelve three-
component geophones are used to record the signals from hydraulic
fracturing. The microseismic record is noisy and amplitude of events
is weak. So not all signals are immediately detectable. I apply the
Unsupervised machine learning 99
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Figure 16. Arrival picking results for the second real surface microseismic
data with extremely strong background noise using the STA/LTA method.
proposed clustering method and the STA/LTA method to the data
set and show the result in Figs 15 and 16, respectively. This data
is much noisier than the previous example. However, the proposed
method is still very robust in detecting those arrivals, which ap-
pear spatially coherent, as indicated by the red circles in Fig. 15.
The results from the STA/LTA method, however, are in a mess,
as indicated by the blue circles in Fig. 16. Without denoising, the
STA/LTA method is almost not possible to accurately detect the
microseismic events while the proposed method can work properly
even in severely corrupted data.
The last real data example is an earthquake data stack pro-
file. Fig. 17 shows Professor Peter Shearer’s stacks over many
earthquakes at a constant epicentral distance (offset angle)
(Shearer 1991a,b). Fig. 17 has been improved a lot from the raw data
by stacking different earthquake data. Different seismic phases can
100 Y. Chen
Figure 17. Arrival picking results for an earthquake data with extremely
strong background noise using the presented method.
Figure 18. Arrival picking results for an earthquake data with extremely
strong background noise using the STA/LTA method.
be seen from the Fig. 17. However, one can see that there are still
significant random and erratic noise existing in the stack profile. By
applying the proposed method directly to the raw stack data, I obtain
a very successful result, which is shown in Fig. 17. Fig. 18 shows
the arrival picking performance using the STA/LTA method, where
the most picking is accurate while there are still a lot of inaccurate
picking.
DISCUSSIONS
The implementation of the proposed clustering method is quite
straightforward and it is easy to control the performance of the
algorithm. The four steps shown in the THEORY section are almost
the whole framework of the algorithm. Once the feature vectors are
fixed (e.g. mean, power, and STA/LTA), the parameters needed to be
defined are just exponent parameter m for the membership matrix U
(see eq. 5), which is usually fixed as m = 2, the number of clusters
C, which is fixed as C = 2. In other words, the method is a fully
automatic method and almost does not require any human inference.
Although minimizing eq. (5) requires several iterations, which is the
main computational cost of the algorithm, it usually takes less than
20 iterations to converge. According to the numerical tests shown
above, the computational cost of the presented algorithm is only
about 10 times larger than the traditional STA/LTA method and the
efficiency in practical applications is still quite acceptable.
The presented automatic microseismic event detection method
based on unsupervised machine learning is more a concept than a
specific type of microseismic event detection method. One the one
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hand, in the unsupervised machine learning framework, the cluster-
ing method is not limited to the fuzzy clustering algorithm. Other
unsupervised machine learning algorithms are worth being inves-
tigated, such as Hierarchical clustering, k-Means clustering, Self-
organizing maps, Hidden Markov models, etc. On the other hand,
the feature vector in the unsupervised machine learning framework
has the potential to be improved. In this paper, I just investigate the
performance based on the three-component feature vector that is
composed of mean, power, and STA/LTA. While each feature com-
ponent can serve as an individual event picker, the combined usage
of all these components in the feature vector through the integrated
fuzzy clustering framework is more appealing. As I have shown, the
integrated application of all three feature components via cluster-
ing is much more robust than the single component, for example,
the STA/LTA method, in a noisy environment. From this aspect, all
other individual event picking methods can be integrated into the
same framework for more robust performance, such as the power
spectral density method in Vaezi & Van der Baan (2015) and the
Akaike information criterion method in Leonard (2000) and Zhang
et al. (2003).
From the comprehensive analysis and discussions of the different
synthetic and real data tests, the main advantage of the proposed
method is its anti-noise ability. It has been shown that when the
noise level is weak to moderately strong, the performance of the
proposed method is very robust. This feature makes the clustering
method very appealing to practical usage, since in most cases where
the noise is not extremely high, the proposed method can be applied
without any pre-processing step and thus can serve as the very
initial estimate of microseismic event detection and serve for the
subsequent event source localization. When the noise level becomes
extremely strong, as seen from the sensitivity test to noise level, the
clustering method may make some mistakes. Although not perfect
in all situations, when the noise level becomes extremely high, a
simple and mild denoising filter can help remove a small amount
of noise but without damaging the useful signals, which is followed
by applying the presented event picker. The future investigation
includes applying the proposed method to a much larger volume of
data set and to further verify the anti-noise effect when the method
is applied in the field.
C O N C LU S I O N S
Microseismic and earthquake data may contain strong distractive
background noise that may heavily affect the waveform arrival pick-
ing, and could further result in an unconvincing tomographic model
that is based on the arrival picking. I have introduced an effective
and intelligent arrival picking algorithm that is based on clustering
analysis. The three features (Mean, Power, STA/LTA) fed into the in-
telligent clustering algorithm make the clustering engine capable of
detecting arrivals in extremely noisy environment without the need
of pre-processing the data. The presented arrival picking algorithm
is an unsupervised machine learning technique that can be applied

to an arbitrarily large amount of microseismic (and earthquake)
data. Unlike the supervised machine learning techniques, the pro-
posed method does not require a reasonably large volume of training
data and thus can be fairly flexible. The fuzzy clustering algorithm
has been shown to be an effective clustering analysis method in
the presented framework. The comparison between the presented
algorithm with the state-of-the-art STA/LTA method shows very
promising performance, especially in the low-SNR data set based
on a combination of several synthetic and real data examples with
different levels of complexity and noise strength.
AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S
I would like to thank Weilin Huang, Huijian Li, Shaohuan Zu and
Dong Zhang for inspiring discussions. The research is previously
supported by Texas Consortium for Computational Seismology
(TCCS) and is currently supported by Distinguished Postdoctoral
Fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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