PredictionX - Predicting Health, and Earthquakes - Question

Hi Daniel! Earthquake prediction is actually what I'm doing my final project on, so while I'm not an expert, I hope this answer could help. The time frame for a major earthquake to occur actually isn't one of the major uncertainties; if anything, that rough estimate is about the closest seismologists can get to earthquake prediction at the moment! The issue more so is when within that time frame will the earthquake occur, and unfortunately, the passing of time doesn't change much. There have been plenty of times where a major earthquake occurred outside that predicted time frame, leading to a kind of "any day now" mentality where people were just waiting for it to finally happen. For your second question, the consensus seems to be that we don't know! Earthquakes, especially major ones, take a long time to build up, and the slow movements that cause earthquakes occur to deep within the Earth for us to directly observe. Additionally, the infrequency of earthquakes makes it difficult to properly study them the same way we do climate and weather, but machine learning seemingly is helping make this process much more feasible. Hope some of that helped :)

Daniel, you raise an interesting question. It seems that as time passes and an earthquake still has not occurred in a region, we would expect it to occur sometime sooner than later. However, this assumes that the earthquake occurring is dependent on when the previous earthquake occurred. If the earthquake occurring is a completely independent event, then we would expect uncertainty to remain relatively constant. However, intuitively there seems to be some sort of dependence, which can be modeled by statistics. Perhaps using past earthquake data to fit the number of earthquake events to a distribution (e.g. Poisson distribution for an event with low probability) could help to model the change in uncertainty over time.