Abstract: Mining and analyzing the spatiotemporal evolution patterns of the small earthquakes can provide auxiliary decision-making support for the analysis and prediction of earthquake disasters. In this paper, based on the seismic monitoring data in Sichuan area, the space time cube was used to fuse the characteristic data of space, time and attributes of earthquake points, and the spatial temporal hot spot statistical analysis methods were utilized to mine the distribution patterns of the spatiotemporal cold spots and hot spots of small earthquakes. The experimental results show that, in the time domain of the experimental data, the hot spots patterns of small earthquakes in Sichuan area are mainly consecutive hot spots, diminishing hot spots and oscillating hot spots, and the cold spots patterns are mainly consecutive cold spots, and the coverage of cold spots is wider than that of hot spots. The spatiotemporal evolution pattern mining method based on space time cube can play the advantage of spatiotemporal statistics, and it is an effective way to mine and analyze the temporal and spatial evolution trend of small earthquakes.

Key words: earthquakes, space time cube, spatial statistics, spatiotemporal pattern, hot spot analysis