PREDICTABILITY OF SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS

We study the predictability of large events in self-organizing systems. We focus on a set of models which have been studied as analogs of earthquake faults and fault systems, and apply methods based on techniques which are of current interest in seismology. In all cases we find detectable correlations between precursory smaller events and the large events we aim to forecast, though in some cases the correlations are very weak. We compare predictions based on different patterns of precursory events and find that for all of the models a precursor based on the spatial distribution of activity outperforms more traditional measures based on temporal variations in the local activity.