“…To our knowledge, other than these two bodies of work, no others have aimed to cluster the NMSZ from a purely statistical perspective. It should be pointed out that in a more general sense, numerous statistical clustering approaches including Kmeans/Kmedian (Kamat and Kamath, 2017;Novianti et al, 2017;Kuyuk et al, 2012;Ramdani et al, 2015;Malyshev, 2016), mixture models (Rhoades and Gerstenberger, 2009;Erisoglu et al, 2011;Rhoades, 2013;Kuyuk et al, 2012)) and spatial point processes (Veen and Schoenberg, 2006;Ogata, 1998;Schoenberg, 2003;Bray and Schoenberg, 2013) have been applied to earthquake data, but not the NMSZ data specifically. Thus, this work was motivated by a desire to statistically identify temporal patterns among earthquake occurrences within the NMSZ.…”