Chapter 7 Point Process Analysis

A point process is a stochastic process that one can think of as “dropping down points” in a domain. For now, we will think of the domain as the real line which will represent time. Therefore, a point process is a stochastic process that drops “events” randomly down on to a time line. The key here is that the time at which events occur is random.

A point process can be thought of as a measure \(N\) such that \(N(A)\) is the number of points of the process that lie in the set \(A\). On the real line, we can say that \(N(a,b]\) is the number of points of the process that lie between \(a\) and \(b\).