The purpose of this paper is to estimate the intensity of a Poisson process $N$ by using thresholding rules. In this paper, the intensity, defined as the derivative of the mean measure of $N$ with respect to $ndx$ where $n$ is a fixed parameter, is assumed to be non-compactly supported. The estimator $\tilde{f}_{n,γ}$ based on random thresholds is proved to achieve the same performance as the oracle estimator up to a logarithmic term. Oracle inequalities allow to derive the maxiset of $\tilde{f}_{n,γ}$. Then, minimax properties of $\tilde{f}_{n,γ}$ are established. We first prove that the rate of this estimator on Besov spaces ${\cal B}^\al_{p,q}$ when $p\leq 2$ is $(\ln(n)/n)^{\al/(1+2\al)}$. This result has two consequences. First, it establishes that the minimax rate of Besov spaces ${\cal B}^\al_{p,q}$ with $p\leq 2$ when non compactly supported functions are considered is the same as for compactly supported functions up to a logarithmic term. This result is new. Furthermore, $\tilde{f}_{n,γ}$ is adaptive minimax up to a logarithmic term. When $p>2$, the situation changes dramatically and the rate of $\tilde{f}_{n,γ}$ on Besov spaces ${\cal B}^\al_{p,q}$ is worse than $(\ln(n)/n)^{\al/(1+2\al)}$. Finally, the random threshold depends on a parameter $γ$ that has to be suitably chosen in practice. Some theoretical results provide upper and lower bounds of $γ$ to obtain satisfying oracle inequalities. Simulations reinforce these results.
We take a wavelet based approach to the analysis of point processes and the estimation of the first order intensity under a continuous time setting. A multiresolution analysis of a point process is formulated which motivates the definition of homogeneity at different scales of resolution, termed $J$-th level homogeneity. Further to this, the activity in a point processes' first order behavior at different scales of resolution is also defined and termed $L$-th level innovation. Likelihood ratio tests for both these properties are proposed with asymptotic distributions provided, even when only a…
The purpose of this paper is to estimate the intensity of a Poisson process $N$ by using thresholding rules. In this paper, the intensity, defined as the derivative of the mean measure of $N$ with respect to $ndx$ where $n$ is a fixed parameter, is assumed to be non-compactly supported. The estimator $\tilde{f}_{n,γ}$ based on random thresholds is proved to achieve the same performance as the oracle estimator up to a possible logarithmic term. Then, minimax properties of $\tilde{f}_{n,γ}$ on Besov spaces ${\cal B}^{\ensuremath α}_{p,q}$ are established. Under mild assumptions, we prove that $$…
We introduce a semi-parametric estimator of the Poisson intensity parameter of a spatial stationary Gibbs point process. Under very mild assumptions satisfied by a large class of Gibbs models, we establish its strong consistency and asymptotic normality. We also consider its finite-sample properties in a simulation study.
In this paper, we revisit the original ideas of Stein and propose an estimator of the intensity parameter of a homogeneous Poisson point process defined in $\R^d$ and observed in a bounded window. The procedure is based on a new general integration by parts formula for Poisson point processes. We show that our Stein estimator outperforms the maximum likelihood estimator in terms of mean squared error. In particular, we show that in many practical situations we have a gain larger than 30\%.
This paper considers the problem of adaptive estimation of a non-homogeneous intensity function from the observation of n independent Poisson processes having a common intensity that is randomly shifted for each observed trajectory. We show that estimating this intensity is a deconvolution problem for which the density of the random shifts plays the role of the convolution operator. In an asymptotic setting where the number n of observed trajectories tends to infinity, we derive upper and lower bounds for the minimax quadratic risk over Besov balls. Non-linear thresholding in a Meyer wavelet b…
We consider the nonparametric estimation of the intensity function of a Poisson point process in a circular model from indirect observations $N_1,\ldots,N_n$. These observations emerge from hidden point process realizations with the target intensity through contamination with additive error. In case that the error distribution can only be estimated from an additional sample $Y_1,\ldots,Y_m$ we derive minimax rates of convergence with respect to the sample sizes $n$ and $m$ under abstract smoothness conditions and propose an orthonormal series estimator which attains the optimal rate of converg…
This paper considers fundamental limits for solving sparse inverse problems in the presence of Poisson noise with physical constraints. Such problems arise in a variety of applications, including photon-limited imaging systems based on compressed sensing. Most prior theoretical results in compressed sensing and related inverse problems apply to idealized settings where the noise is i.i.d., and do not account for signal-dependent noise and physical sensing constraints. Prior results on Poisson compressed sensing with signal-dependent noise and physical constraints provided upper bounds on mean …
This paper proposes a model of interactions between two point processes, ruled by a reproduction function h, which is considered as the intensity of a Poisson process. In particular, we focus on the context of neurosciences to detect possible interactions in the cerebral activity associated with two neurons. To provide a mathematical answer to this specific problem of neurobiologists, we address so the question of testing the nullity of the intensity h. We construct a multiple testing procedure obtained by the aggregation of single tests based on a wavelet thresholding method. This test has go…
We consider the problem of hypothesis testing in the situation where the first hypothesis is simple and the second one is local one-sided composite. We describe the choice of the thresholds and the power functions of different tests when the intensity function of the observed inhomogeneous Poisson process has two different types of singularity: cusp and discontinuity. The asymptotic results are illustrated by numerical simulations.
We consider an inhomogeneous Poisson process $X$ on $[0,T]$. The intensity function of $X$ is supposed to be strictly positive and smooth on $[0,T]$ except at the point $θ$, in which it has either a 0-type singularity (tends to 0 like $\abs{x}^p$, $p\in(0,1)$), or an $\infty$-type singularity (tends to $\infty$ like $\abs{x}^p$, $p\in(-1,0)$). We suppose that we know the shape of the intensity function, but not the location of the singularity. We consider the problem of estimation of this location (shift) parameter $θ$ based on $n$ observations of the process $X$. We study the Bayesian estimat…
We consider the problem of parameter estimation by observations of inhomogeneous Poisson process. It is well-known that if the regularity conditions are fulfilled then the maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimators are consistent, asymptotically normal and asymptotically efficient. These regularity conditions can be roughly presented as follows: a) the intensity function of observed process belongs to known parametric family of functions, b) the model is identifiable, c) the Fisher information is positive continuous function, d) the intensity function is sufficiently smooth with respect to the…
We consider the problem of localization of Poisson source by the observations of inhomogeneous Poisson processes. We suppose that there are $k$ detectors on the plane and each detector provides the observations of Poisson processes whose intensity functions depend on the position of the emitter. We describe the properties of the maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimators. We show that under regularity conditions these estimators are consistent, asymptotically normal and asymptotically efficient. Then we propose some simple consistent estimators and this estimators are further used to construct…
We investigate in multidimensional compound Poisson processes (CPP) the relation between the dependence structure of the jump distribution and the dependence structure of the respective components of the CPP itself. For this purpose the asymptotic $λt\to \infty$ is considered, where $λ$ denotes the intensity and $t$ the time point of the CPP. For modeling the dependence structures we are using the concept of copulas. We prove that the copula of a CPP converges under quite general assumptions to a specific Gaussian copula, depending on the underlying jump distribution. Let $F$ be a $d$-dimensio…
We consider the problem of hypothesis testing in the situation when the first hypothesis is simple and the second one is local one-sided composite. We describe the choice of the thresholds and the power functions of the Score Function test, of the General Likelihood Ratio test, of the Wald test and of two Bayes tests in the situation when the intensity function of the observed inhomogeneous Poisson process is smooth with respect to the parameter. It is shown that almost all these tests are asymptotically uniformly most powerful. The results of numerical simulations are presented.
In this paper, we deal with the problem of calibrating thresholding rules in the setting of Poisson intensity estimation. By using sharp concentration inequalities, oracle inequalities are derived and we establish the optimality of our estimate up to a logarithmic term. This result is proved under mild assumptions and we do not impose any condition on the support of the signal to be estimated. Our procedure is based on data-driven thresholds. As usual, they depend on a threshold parameter $γ$ whose optimal value is hard to estimate from the data. Our main concern is to provide some theoretical…
This paper deals with the study of dependencies between two given events modeled by point processes. In particular, we focus on the context of DNA to detect favored or avoided distances between two given motifs along a genome suggesting possible interactions at a molecular level. For this, we naturally introduce a so-called reproduction function h that allows to quantify the favored positions of the motifs and which is considered as the intensity of a Poisson process. Our first interest is the estimation of this function h assumed to be well localized. The estimator based on random thresholds …
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
We present the Additive Poisson Process (APP), a novel framework that can model the higher-order interaction effects of the intensity functions in stochastic processes using lower dimensional projections. Our model combines the techniques in information geometry to model higher-order interactions on a statistical manifold and in generalized additive models to use lower-dimensional projections to overcome the effects from the curse of dimensionality. Our approach solves a convex optimization problem by minimizing the KL divergence from a sample distribution in lower dimensional projections to t…
Modelling the first-order intensity function is one of the main aims in point process theory, and it has been approached so far from different perspectives. One appealing model describes the intensity as a function of a spatial covariate. In the recent literature, estimation theory and several applications have been developed assuming this model, but without formally checking this assumption. In this paper we address this problem for a non-homogeneous Poisson point process, by proposing a new test based on an $L^2$-distance. We also prove the asymptotic normality of the statistic and we sugges…
We present methodology for estimating the stochastic intensity of a doubly stochastic Poisson process. Statistical and theoretical analyses of traffic traces show that these processes are appropriate models of high intensity traffic arriving at an array of service systems. The statistical estimation of the underlying latent stochastic intensity process driving the traffic model involves a rather complicated nonlinear filtering problem. We develop a novel simulation methodology, using deep neural networks to approximate the path measures induced by the stochastic intensity process, for solving …
A compound Poisson process whose parameters are all unknown is observed at finitely many equispaced times. Nonparametric estimators of the jump and Lévy distributions are proposed and functional central limit theorems using the uniform norm are proved for both under mild conditions. The limiting Gaussian processes are identified and efficiency of the estimators is established. Kernel estimators for the mass function, the intensity and the drift are also proposed, their asymptotic properties including efficiency are analysed, and joint asymptotic normality is shown. Inference tools such as conf…
We propose an image deconvolution algorithm when the data is contaminated by Poisson noise. The image to restore is assumed to be sparsely represented in a dictionary of waveforms such as the wavelet or curvelet transform. Our key innovations are: First, we handle the Poisson noise properly by using the Anscombe variance stabilizing transform leading to a non-linear degradation equation with additive Gaussian noise. Second, the deconvolution problem is formulated as the minimization of a convex functional with a data-fidelity term reflecting the noise properties, and a non-smooth sparsity-prom…
This paper studies theory and inference of an observation-driven model for time series of counts. It is assumed that the observations follow a Poisson distribution conditioned on an accompanying intensity process, which is equipped with a two-regime structure according to the magnitude of the lagged observations. The model remedies one of the drawbacks of the Poisson autoregression model by allowing possibly negative correlation in the observations. Classical Markov chain theory and Lyapunov's method are utilized to derive the conditions under which the process has a unique invariant probabili…
We propose a new methodology for denoising, variance-stabilizing and normalizing signals whose both mean and variance are parameterized by a single unknown varying parameter, such as Poisson or scaled chi-squared. Key to our methodology is the observation that the signed and square-rooted generalized log-likelihood ratio test for the equality of the local means is approximately and asymptotically distributed as standard normal under the null. We use these test statistics within the Haar wavelet transform at each scale and location, referring to them as the likelihood ratio Haar (LRH) coefficie…
We apply nonparametric Bayesian methods to study the problem of estimating the intensity function of an inhomogeneous Poisson process. We exhibit a prior on intensities which both leads to a computationally feasible method and enjoys desirable theoretical optimality properties. The prior we use is based on B-spline expansions with free knots, adapted from well-established methods used in regression, for instance. We illustrate its practical use in the Poisson process setting by analyzing count data coming from a call centre. Theoretically we derive a new general theorem on contraction rates fo…
We derive concentration inequalities for maxima of empirical processes associated with Poisson point processes. The proofs are based on a careful application of Ledoux's entropy method. We demonstrate the utility of the obtained concentration inequalities by application to adaptive intensity estimation.
We propose to test the homogeneity of a Poisson process observed on a finite interval. In this framework, we first provide lower bounds for the uniform separation rates in $\mathbb{L}^2$ norm over classical Besov bodies and weak Besov bodies. Surprisingly, the obtained lower bounds over weak Besov bodies coincide with the minimax estimation rates over such classes. Then we construct non asymptotic and nonparametric testing procedures that are adaptive in the sense that they achieve, up to a possible logarithmic factor, the optimal uniform separation rates over various Besov bodies simultaneous…
We consider a doubly stochastic Poisson process with stochastic intensity $λ_t =n q\left(X_t\right)$ where $X$ is a continuous Itô semimartingale and $n$ is an integer. Both processes are observed continuously over a fixed period $\left[0,T\right]$. An estimation procedure is proposed in a non parametrical setting for the function $q$ on an interval $I$ where $X$ is sufficiently observed using a local polynomial estimator. A method to select the bandwidth in a non asymptotic framework is proposed, leading to an oracle inequality. If $m$ is the degree of the chosen polynomial, the accuracy of o…
This paper discusses properties of a Doubly Stochastic Poisson Process (DSPP) where the intensity process belongs to a class of affine diffusions. For any intensity process from this class we derive an analytical expression for probability distribution functions of the corresponding DSPP. A specification of our results is provided in a particular case where the intensity is given by one-dimensional Feller process and its parameters are estimated by Kalman filtering for high frequency transaction data.
In this paper we provide theoretical support for the so-called "Sigmoidal Gaussian Cox Process" approach to learning the intensity of an inhomogeneous Poisson process on a $d$-dimensional domain. This method was proposed by Adams, Murray and MacKay (ICML, 2009), who developed a tractable computational approach and showed in simulation and real data experiments that it can work quite satisfactorily. The results presented in the present paper provide theoretical underpinning of the method. In particular, we show how to tune the priors on the hyper parameters of the model in order for the procedu…
We consider nonparametric Bayesian estimation and prediction for nonhomogeneous Poisson process models with unknown intensity functions. We propose a class of improper priors for intensity functions. Nonparametric Bayesian inference with kernel mixture based on the class improper priors is shown to be useful, although improper priors have not been widely used for nonparametric Bayes problems. Several theorems corresponding to those for finite-dimensional independent Poisson models hold for nonhomogeneous Poisson process models with infinite-dimensional parameter spaces. Bayesian estimation and…
The observations in many applications consist of counts of discrete events, such as photons hitting a dector, which cannot be effectively modeled using an additive bounded or Gaussian noise model, and instead require a Poisson noise model. As a result, accurate reconstruction of a spatially or temporally distributed phenomenon (f) from Poisson data (y) cannot be accomplished by minimizing a conventional l2-l1 objective function. The problem addressed in this paper is the estimation of f from y in an inverse problem setting, where (a) the number of unknowns may potentially be larger than the nu…
The effectiveness of Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) has been demonstrated in a variety of contexts including non-parametric regression and classification. A BART scheme for estimating the intensity of inhomogeneous Poisson processes is introduced. Poisson intensity estimation is a vital task in various applications including medical imaging, astrophysics and network traffic analysis. The new approach enables full posterior inference of the intensity in a non-parametric regression setting. The performance of the novel scheme is demonstrated through simulation studies on synthetic and…
Considering two independent Poisson processes, we address the question of testing equality of their respective intensities. We first propose single tests whose test statistics are U-statistics based on general kernel functions. The corresponding critical values are constructed from a non-asymptotic wild bootstrap approach, leading to level αtests. Various choices for the kernel functions are possible, including projection, approximation or reproducing kernels. In this last case, we obtain a parametric rate of testing for a weak metric defined in the RKHS associated with the considered reproduc…
We study the binary classification problem for Poisson point processes, which are allowed to take values in a general metric space. The problem is tackled in two different ways: estimating nonparametricaly the intensity functions of the processes (and then plugged into a deterministic formula which expresses the regression function in terms of the intensities), and performing the classical $k$ nearest neighbor rule by introducing a suitable distance between patterns of points. In the first approach we prove the consistency of the estimated intensity so that the rule turns out to be also consis…
Motivated by applications in cybersecurity and epidemiology, we consider the problem of detecting an abrupt change in the intensity of a Poisson process, characterised by a jump (non transitory change) or a bump (transitory change) from constant. We propose a complete study from the nonasymptotic minimax testing point of view, when the constant baseline intensity is known or unknown. The question of minimax adaptation with respect to each parameter (height, location, length) of the change is tackled, leading to a comprehensive overview of the various minimax separation rate regimes. We exhibit…
We consider a particular Cox process from a Bayesian viewpoint and show that the Bayes estimator of the intensity measure is the so-called Pólya sum kernel, which occurred recently in the context of the construction of the so-called Papangelou processes. More precisely, if the prior, the directing measure of the Cox process, is a Poisson-Gamma random measure, then the posterior is again a Poisson-Gamma random measure and the Bayes estimator of the intensity is the Pólya sum kernel. Moreover, we extend this result to doubly stochastic Poisson-Gamma priors and give conditions under which one can…
This work is devoted to the problem of estimation of the localization of Poisson source. The observations are inhomogeneous Poisson processes registered by the $k\geq 3$ detectors on the plane. We study the behavior of the Bayes estimators in the asymptotic of large intensities. It is supposed that the intensity functions of the signals arriving in the detectors have cusp-type singularity. We show the consistency, limit distributions and the convergence of moments of these estimators.
Assume that we observe a sample of size n composed of p-dimensional signals, each signal having independent entries drawn from a scaled Poisson distribution with an unknown intensity. We are interested in estimating the sum of the n unknown intensity vectors, under the assumption that most of them coincide with a given 'background' signal. The number s of p-dimensional signals different from the background signal plays the role of sparsity and the goal is to leverage this sparsity assumption in order to improve the quality of estimation as compared to the naive estimator that computes the sum …
Given data from a Poisson point process with intensity $(x,y) \mapsto n \mathbf{1}(f(x)\leq y),$ frequentist properties for the Bayesian reconstruction of the support boundary function $f$ are derived. We mainly study compound Poisson process priors with fixed intensity proving that the posterior contracts with nearly optimal rate for monotone and piecewise constant support boundaries and adapts to Hölder smooth boundaries with smoothness index at most one. We then derive a non-standard Bernstein-von Mises result for a compound Poisson process prior and a function space with increasing paramet…
We consider the problem of the estimation of the mean function of an inhomogeneous Poisson process when its intensity function is periodic. For the mean integrated squared error (MISE) there is a classical lower bound for all estimators and the empirical mean function attains that lower bound, thus it is asymptotically efficient. Following the ideas of the work by Golubev and Levit, we compare asymptotically efficient estimators and propose an estimator which is second order asymptotically efficient. Second order efficiency is done over Sobolev ellipsoids, following the idea of Pinsker.
This paper deals with feature selection procedures for spatial point processes intensity estimation. We consider regularized versions of estimating equations based on Campbell theorem derived from two classical functions: Poisson likelihood and logistic regression likelihood. We provide general conditions on the spatial point processes and on penalty functions which ensure consistency, sparsity and asymptotic normality. We discuss the numerical implementation and assess finite sample properties in a simulation study. Finally, an application to tropical forestry datasets illustrates the use of …
