A validation study of α-stable distribution characteristic for seismic data

This paper studied the statistical characteristics of seismic traces. Compared with the statistical characteristic of α-stable distribution random variables, it drew a conclusion that the distribution of real seismic traces should be heavy tailed and asymmetric. They are the characteristics of non-Gaussian α-stable distribution rather than the traditional Gaussian distribution. Following this assumption, the Kogon-Williams characteristic estimation method was applied to estimate the α-stable distribution parameters from the seismic traces. As expected, the estimated characteristic exponent α of the seismic traces are less than 2 and symmetry parameters are not 0. QQ-plots and sample variances experiments were conducted on simulated random data and seismic traces. The experiments verify the assumption that seismic data follow non-Gaussian α-stable distributions.