This book is the first comprehensive and methodologically rigorous
analysis of earthquake occurrence. Models based on the theory of the
stochastic multidimensional point processes are employed to approximate
the earthquake occurrence pattern and evaluate its parameters. The
Author shows that most of these parameters have universal values. These
results help explain the classical earthquake distributions: Omori's law
and the Gutenberg-Richter relation.
The Author derives a new negative-binomial distribution for earthquake
numbers, instead of the Poisson distribution, and then determines a
fractal correlation dimension for spatial distributions of earthquake
hypocenters. The book also investigates the disorientation of earthquake
focal mechanisms and shows that it follows the rotational Cauchy
distribution. These statistical and mathematical advances make it
possible to produce quantitative forecasts of earthquake occurrence. In
these forecasts earthquake rate in time, space, and focal mechanism
orientation is evaluated.