pyCSEP: A Python Toolkit For Earthquake Forecast Developers

For government officials and the public to act on real-time forecasts of earthquakes, the seismological community needs to develop confidence in the underlying scientific hypotheses of the forecast generating models by assessing their predictive skill. For this purpose, the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP) provides cyberinfrastructure and computational tools to evaluate earthquake forecasts. Here, we introduce pyCSEP, a Python package to help earthquake forecast developers embed model evaluation into the model development process. The package contains the following modules: (1) earthquake catalog access and processing, (2) data models for earthquake forecasts, (3) statistical tests for evaluating earthquake forecasts, and (4) visualization routines. pyCSEP can evaluate earthquake forecasts expressed as expected rates in space-magnitude bins, and simulation-based forecasts that produce thousands of synthetic seismicity catalogs. Most importantly, pyCSEP contains community-endorsed implementations of statistical tests to evaluate earthquake forecasts, and provides well defined file formats and standards to facilitate model comparisons. The toolkit will facilitate integrating new forecasting models into testing centers, which evaluate forecast models and prediction algorithms in an automated, prospective and independent manner, forming a critical step towards reliable operational earthquake forecasting.