Use of seismic data from similar regions

Attention is first focused on the probability distributions of the exceedance rates of given earthquake magnitudes when the generation process is idealized as Poisson. But data on significant disturbances are always scarce. Local‐seismicity assessment is hence guided by information from tectonically similar areas, but ordinarily the guidance is intuitive. Bayesian statistics constitute the tool to do this rationally. Two more alternatives are presented and illustrated here. The approach is extended to a generating process that includes the Poisson as a special case.