Statistical analysis of Italian earthquake catalogue 1600 - 2003

Earthquake catalogues are an historical memory of seismology that contains the main characteristics of shocks like time, magnitude and epicenter coordinates. These catalogues are very important because they allow to study the past seismic events of a reference region. Here we study an Italian catalogue from 1600 to 2003 and report results based on statistical data depth. With this method we want to measure the seismic risk. Small (Small, 1990) first advocated the use of data depth to study the spatial distribution of earthquake epicenters on the Earth’ surface. His suggestion was meant as an illustration of data depth of directional data because epicenters can be represented as points on the surface of a sphere. In this work, first, we illustrate the general features of the Italian earthquake catalogue together with the results of preliminary descriptive analysis. After that we introduce the concept of data depth and provide a map of seismic risk for Italy using the depth centrality ordering (Liu et al, 1999). Finally, we include in the analysis the intensity of earthquakes with the goal to obtain a comprehensive investigation of the data.