ANQDS: a MATLAB based graphical user interface developed for discrimination of the natural and artificial seismic events

Both natural and artificial seismic events are recorded by seismic stations without any discrimination. In this scope, discriminating the artificial and natural seismic events is an important task in terms of seismic risk analysis. This paper presents an open-source MATLAB based graphical user interface, ANQDS (Artificial and Natural Quake Discrimination Software), for discrimination of the artificial and natural seismic events. ANQDS is a user-friendly program that utilizes a semi-automatic algorithm based on the four different methods to determine the source of a seismic event: (a) amplitude ratio; (b) complexity; (c) power spectral density; and (d) short-time Fourier transform. It can automatically analyze a seismic event using the amplitude ratio and complexity methods, however, for the analyzes based on the power spectral density and short-time Fourier transform methods, it needs user support. The code employs the approaches called the linear and quadratic discriminant functions for statistical operations. Besides, the developed code can analyze a seismic event for each recording station and eventually reach a general result from these analyses. In order to test the performance and reliability of the developed algorithm, four different seismic events from Turkey have been analyzed. As a result, it was seen that ANQDS can discriminate these seismic events with success rates ranging from 87.37% to 100%.