The role of quality engineering is to give an effective simple measure of functional variation using signal-to-noise ratio from a set of all proposed data. On the case of earthquake prediction, it is recommended to use the Mahalanobis distance defined from all kinds of data, proposed by the person in-charge of prediction, where there was no earthquake during a certain future period.
The Mahalanobis distance calculated from the data where actually an earthquake happened is used as a response. Letting Mi be the magnitude of the (i-th) earthquake at the place and Yi the Mahalanobis distance to obtain the signal-to-noise ratio to judge the usefulness of the prediction.