<![CDATA[This study examines the feasibility of employing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to estimate earthquake-induced building damage using a focused dataset derived from the continuous 8-day mainshock–aftershock sequence that occurred in March 2024. A total of 483 events were analyzed, utilizing three readily available source parameters: magnitude, depth, and epicentral distance to predict the corresponding EMS-98 damage grade. The motivation for using an LSTM architecture stems from its capacity to model temporal dependencies within sequential seismic activity, despite the limited size of the dataset. The best-performing single-split model (B4) achieved a test R^2 of 0.5738 and an RMSE of 0.2997 on the held-out set. However, to obtain a more robust assessment of the model’s generalizability, a 5-fold TimeSeriesSplit cross-validation was conducted. The cross-validation procedure yielded a mean R^2 of 0.49 with a standard deviation of 0.27, and a mean RMSE of 0.33 with a standard deviation of 0.16. These results demonstrate that the LSTM model provides a credible baseline model for exploratory damage estimation, although a substantial portion of the variance remains unexplained due to the absence of geotechnical, soil amplification, and structural fragility information. The findings highlight the potential of sequence-based modeling for rapid damage estimation and underscore the need for integrating site-specific and structural variables in future work to enhance predictive accuracy.]]>
