The mathematical representation of seismic sources is an important part of probabilistic seismic hazard assessment. It reflects the association of the seismicity with the tectonically‐active geological structures evidenced by seismotectonic studies. Given that most active faults are not characterized well enough, seismic sources are generally defined as areal zones, delimited with finite boundary polygons, within which the geological features of active tectonics and the seismicity are deemed homogeneous (e.g., focal depth, seismicity rate, and maximum magnitude). Besides the lack of data (e.g., narrow range of recorded magnitudes), the application of this representation generates different problems: 1) a large sensitivity of resulting hazard maps on the location of zone boundaries, while these boundaries are set by expert decision; 2) the zoning can not represent any variation in faulting mechanism; 3) the seismicity rates are distributed throughout the zones and we lose the location of the determinant in...