A study of the time distribution of inter-cluster earthquakes in Taiwan

In this study, we analyze the time distribution of inter-cluster earthquakes in Taiwan to infer correlation of earthquake occurrences. Our study based on the Diffusion Entropy Analysis (DEA) shows that there is positive correlation when the event time series is sampled by a time unit ranging from 120 to 1800 min. Also in the range of the time unit, two-slope feature in the determination of scaling exponent in DEA is observed, and the scenario is demonstrated by the simulations of synthetic earthquake sequence generated by the Copying Mistake Map model. Our simulation suggests that the earthquake sequence may consist of a randomness sequence and a correlated sequence, and the latter contributes to the correlation observed in our analysis. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.