Deep learning for quality control of receiver functions

Receiver function has been routinely used for studying the discontinuity structure in the crust and upper mantle. The manual quality control of receiver functions, which plays a key role in high-quality data selection and accurate structural imaging, has been challenged by today’s booming data volumes. Traditional automatic quality control methods usually require tuning hyperparameters and fail to generalize to low signal-to-noise ratio data. Deep learning has been increasingly used to deal with extensive seismic data. However, it generally requires a manually labeled dataset, and its performance is highly related to the network design. In this study, we develop and compare four different deep learning network designs with manual and traditional quality control methods using 53293 receiver functions from three broadband seismic stations. Our results show that a combination of convolutional and long-short memory layers achieves the best performance of ∼91% accuracy. We also propose a fully automatic training schema that requires zero manually labeled receiver function yet achieves similar performance to that using carefully labeled ones. Compared with the traditional automatic method, our model retrieves ∼5 times more reliable receiver functions from relatively small earthquakes with magnitudes between 5.0 and 5.5. The average waveforms and H-κ stacking results of these receiver functions are comparable to those obtained by manual quality control from earthquakes with magnitudes larger than 5.5, which further demonstrates the validity of our method and indicates its potential for making use of smaller earthquakes in the receiver function analysis.