  A methodology for the development of a fuzzy expert system (FES) with
application to earthquake prediction is presented. The idea is to reproduce the
performance of a human expert in earthquake prediction. To do this, at the
first step, rules provided by the human expert are used to generate a fuzzy
rule base. These rules are then fed into an inference engine to produce a fuzzy
inference system (FIS) and to infer the results. In this paper, we have used a
Sugeno type fuzzy inference system to build the FES. At the next step, the
adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is used to refine the FES
parameters and improve its performance. The proposed framework is then employed
to attain the performance of a human expert used to predict earthquakes in the
Zagros area based on the idea of coupled earthquakes. While the prediction
results are promising in parts of the testing set, the general performance
indicates that prediction methodology based on coupled earthquakes needs more
investigation and more complicated reasoning procedure to yield satisfactory
predictions.
