Abstract
Earthquakes have brought fear to humans due to their unpredictable nature and vast capacity for ruination. The spatial point process plays an essential role in investigating spatial statistics and has become an active research area. This study investigates the behavior of earthquake occurrences using the Strauss point model. The intensity and spatial association among these seismic events are examined using distance-based G-function and model fitting. Dataset used in this study is the earthquakes that occurred in various parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Pakistan. Results reveal that the intensity plot exhibits the clustered pattern of earthquake events. Distance-based G-function indicates that the distance from one massive earthquake (magnitude greater than 5) to another large earthquake is 1500 m, demonstrating that the large earthquakes occurred close to each other. The estimated parameters of the models suggest that the intensity of the events is inversely proportional to the distance. The intensity of the earthquake events also increases as the depth decreases. The point pattern modeling results show that the Strauss point model is competent to capture the pattern of the earthquake locations depending upon the interaction between earthquakes of different magnitude. Results disclosed that an additional exploratory variable (depth of earthquake) in the model offers performance gain as compared to the single exploratory variable. Strauss model comprehensively examines the dataset.