S U M M A R Y We develop an automated strategy for discriminating deep microseismic events from shallow ones on the basis of the waveforms recorded on a limited number of surface receivers. Machinelearning techniques are employed to explore the relationship between event hypocentres and seismic features of the recorded signals in time, frequency and time-frequency domains. We applied the technique to 440 microearthquakes −1.7 < M w < 1.29, induced by an underground cavern collapse in the

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... nville Salt Dome in Bayou Corne, Louisiana. Forty different seismic attributes of whole seismograms including degree of polarization and spectral attributes were measured. A selected set of features was then used to train the system to discriminate between deep and shallow events based on the knowledge gained from existing patterns. The cross-validation test showed that events with depth shallower than 250 m can be discriminated from events with hypocentral depth between 1000 and 2000 m with 88 per cent and 90.7 per cent accuracy using logistic regression and artificial neural network models, respectively. Similar results were obtained using single station seismograms. The results show that the spectral features have the highest correlation to source depth. Spectral centroids and 2-D crosscorrelations in the time-frequency domain are two new seismic features used in this study that showed to be promising measures for seismic event classification. The used machine-learning techniques have application for efficient automatic classification of low energy signals recorded at one or more seismic stations.