Deep spatio-temporal point processes: Advances and new directions

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cheng, Xiuyuan, Dong, Zheng, Xie, Yao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cheng, Xiuyuan
Dong, Zheng
Xie, Yao
author_facet Cheng, Xiuyuan
Dong, Zheng
Xie, Yao
contents Spatio-temporal point processes (STPPs) model discrete events distributed in time and space, with important applications in areas such as criminology, seismology, epidemiology, and social networks. Traditional models often rely on parametric kernels, limiting their ability to capture heterogeneous, nonstationary dynamics. Recent innovations integrate deep neural architectures -- either by modeling the conditional intensity function directly or by learning flexible, data-driven influence kernels, substantially broadening their expressive power. This article reviews the development of the deep influence kernel approach, which enjoys statistical explainability, since the influence kernel remains in the model to capture the spatiotemporal propagation of event influence and its impact on future events, while also possessing strong expressive power, thereby benefiting from both worlds. We explain the main components in developing deep kernel point processes, leveraging tools such as functional basis decomposition and graph neural networks to encode complex spatial or network structures, as well as estimation using both likelihood-based and likelihood-free methods, and address computational scalability for large-scale data. We also discuss the theoretical foundation of kernel identifiability. Simulated and real-data examples highlight applications to crime analysis, earthquake aftershock prediction, and sepsis prediction modeling, and we conclude by discussing promising directions for the field.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_06364
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep spatio-temporal point processes: Advances and new directions
Cheng, Xiuyuan
Dong, Zheng
Xie, Yao
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
Spatio-temporal point processes (STPPs) model discrete events distributed in time and space, with important applications in areas such as criminology, seismology, epidemiology, and social networks. Traditional models often rely on parametric kernels, limiting their ability to capture heterogeneous, nonstationary dynamics. Recent innovations integrate deep neural architectures -- either by modeling the conditional intensity function directly or by learning flexible, data-driven influence kernels, substantially broadening their expressive power. This article reviews the development of the deep influence kernel approach, which enjoys statistical explainability, since the influence kernel remains in the model to capture the spatiotemporal propagation of event influence and its impact on future events, while also possessing strong expressive power, thereby benefiting from both worlds. We explain the main components in developing deep kernel point processes, leveraging tools such as functional basis decomposition and graph neural networks to encode complex spatial or network structures, as well as estimation using both likelihood-based and likelihood-free methods, and address computational scalability for large-scale data. We also discuss the theoretical foundation of kernel identifiability. Simulated and real-data examples highlight applications to crime analysis, earthquake aftershock prediction, and sepsis prediction modeling, and we conclude by discussing promising directions for the field.
title Deep spatio-temporal point processes: Advances and new directions
topic Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06364