· Finally, we propose to use support vector machine (SVM) as a classification tool to discriminate between earthquakes and quarry blasts. SVM is one of the standard tools for machine learning and data mining and a popular tool for a wide range of supervised pattern recognition problems (Cristianini and Shawe-Taylor 2000 ; Muller et al. 2001 ; Catanzaro et al. 2008 ; Schölkopf et al. 1999 ).