Seismic Detection Model Using Machine Learning to Protect the Public from Landslide and Earthquake Disasters in Kenya

Abstract

Earthquakes and tremors are a common occurrence throughout the world, mostly in China, Japan and Indonesia. In Kenya, we experience a lot of tremors and landslides during the rainy seasons that have extensive negative social, economic, and environmental impacts. These damages include loss of human life, financial loss and destruction of infrastructure. This becomes a lagging factor towards achieving the Vision 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study used secondary data, obtained from World Wide Standardized Seismograph Station (WWSSSN) in Kilimambogo. Stochastic artificial neural network was adopted to identify prone areas to the said natural disasters, measure the socioeconomic impacts and build a predictive model for landslides, tremor and earthquakes in Kenya. It was evident that landslides are destructive in nature through observable measurable impacts on people. They increase the social and economic burden on the affected people. 64.76% of the measurable impacts affect human beings directly while the rest affect cattle and crops. Along the Great rift valley, most earthquakes and landslides took place. This is attributed to the active seismic activities. Kenya experiences earthquakes of magnitude m < 4. Our model achieved root mean square of 0.435. Furthermore, we got R2=0.80 for testing dataset. This implied that 80% of data was trainable by the model. Therefore, the predictive neural network model is efficient and accurate in forecasting, and more importantly is a good fit model.