%0 Journal Article %@ 0031-9007 %A Zaliapin, Ilya %A Gabrielov, Andrei %A Keilis-Borok, Vladimir %A Wong, Henry %A Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada 89557-0084, USA, %A Departments of Mathematics and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-1395, USA, %A Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, and Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of California Los Angeles, 3845 Slichter Hall, Los Angeles, California 90095-1567, USA, %D 2008 %F epos:195 %I The American Physical Society %J Physical Review Letters %N 1 %T Clustering Analysis of Seismicity and Aftershock Identification %U https://episodesplatform.eu/eprints/195/ %V 101 %X We introduce a statistical methodology for clustering analysis of seismicity in the time-space-energy domain and use it to establish the existence of two statistically distinct populations of earthquakes: clustered and nonclustered. This result can be used, in particular, for nonparametric aftershock identification. The proposed approach expands the analysis of Baiesi and Paczuski [Phys. Rev. E 69, 066106 (2004)] based on the space-time-magnitude nearest-neighbor distance η between earthquakes. We show that for a homogeneous Poisson marked point field with exponential marks, the distance η has the Weibull distribution, which bridges our results with classical correlation analysis for point fields. The joint 2D distribution of spatial and temporal components of η is used to identify the clustered part of a point field. The proposed technique is applied to several seismicity models and to the observed seismicity of southern California.