  Recently a likelihood-based methodology has been developed by the
Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP) with a view to
testing and ranking seismicity models. We analyze this approach from the
standpoint of possible applications to hazard analysis. We arrive at the
conclusion that model testing can be made more efficient by focusing on some
integral characteristics of the seismicity distribution. This is achieved
either in the likelihood framework but with economical and physically
reasonable coarsening of the phase space or by choosing a suitable measure of
closeness between empirical and model seismicity rate in this space.
