Author(s)

J. Mateu & J.L. Uso

Abstract

A spatial point pattern is a set of data consisting of n locations in an essentially planar region A. Examples include the locations of cell nuclei in a microscopic tissue section, trees in a forest or cases of disease in a geographical region. A fundamental assumption in the analysis of such data is that they can usefully be regarded as a partial realisation of a stochastic point process. Two stages in the analysis of a spatial point pattern are to calculate one or more empirical functions to summarise the data, for example, empirical distributions of inter- point distances or nearest neighbour distances and to assess these summary descriptions relative to an appropriate benchmark hypothesis, the simplest example of which is that the data form a partial realisation of a planar Poisson process. The

Keywords