Abstract
This paper presents a method for developing recurrence relationships which are consistent with the available geological, historical, and instrumental occurrence information. The Maximum Entropy Principle (MEP) is utilized to obtain unbiased recurrence relationships. The differences between the conventional least-squares method and the MEP method are discussed and examined through several examples. A modified MEP method is also suggested to incorporate very long-term geological information about the occurrence of large earthquakes with the short-term historical or instrumental information about small to medium-size earthquakes. It is shown that the modified MEP method can combine different sources of information with varying quality into a single minimally biased recurrence relationship. The method developed in this paper is intended for use in seismic hazard analysis.
