Structured generative modelling of earthquake response spectra with hierarchical latent variables in hyperbolic geometry

Abstract

Abstract This study presents a geometry-aware generative modelling framework for earthquake response spectra, leveraging a hierarchical variational autoencoder (HVAE) with latent variables embedded in a Poincaré ball manifold. Predicting complete ground motion response spectra is crucial for seismic hazard analysis and structural performance assessment; however, conventional machine learning models often fail to capture multi-scale physical dependencies and hierarchical uncertainity inherent in earthquake records that arise from event-to-event variablity and spatial variability. The proposed architecture is trained using source and site parameters to regularise the latent space which enables the generation of physically consistent spectral amplitudes while explicitly modelling inter- and intra-event variabilities . By exploiting hyperbolic latent geometry, the HVAE encodes hierarchical relationships into the latent space with an improved representational efficiency. Trained on a curated strong-motion dataset, the model achieves high reconstruction fidelity, with a mean coefficient of determination of 0.961 across all spectral periods. Integration into stochastic ground motion simulation and early warning pipelines demonstrates its practical utility. This work bridges geometric deep learning and seismological modelling, offering a principled, domain-aligned approach to real-time seismic risk mitigation.