Abstract: Various features of geology,geomorphology and geophysics in Beijing and its vicinity were studied. Pattern recognition was used to analyze these features. The results show that the earthquake prone areas are related to major active faults and Cenozoic fault basins. In a certain area,the more the number of active faults,the greater is the posibility of strong earthquakes. However there seems to be no relation between the difference in topographical altitude and strong earthquake proneness. The FH experiment shows that pattern recognition is successful: the five areas that were struck by earthquakes of M6.0 from 1883 to 1983 have been analyzed by our pattern recognition method and shown to be earthquake prone.