Neural Diffusion Intensity Models for Point Process Data

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Du, Xinlong, Honnappa, Harsha, Rao, Vinayak
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866914357915418624
author Du, Xinlong
Honnappa, Harsha
Rao, Vinayak
author_facet Du, Xinlong
Honnappa, Harsha
Rao, Vinayak
contents Cox processes model overdispersed point process data via a latent stochastic intensity, but both nonparametric estimation of the intensity model and posterior inference over intensity paths are typically intractable, relying on expensive MCMC methods. We introduce Neural Diffusion Intensity Models, a variational framework for Cox processes driven by neural SDEs. Our key theoretical result, based on enlargement of filtrations, shows that conditioning on point process observations preserves the diffusion structure of the latent intensity with an explicit drift correction. This guarantees the variational family contains the true posterior, so that ELBO maximization coincides with maximum likelihood estimation under sufficient model capacity. We design an amortized encoder architecture that maps variable-length event sequences to posterior intensity paths by simulating the drift-corrected SDE, replacing repeated MCMC runs with a single forward pass. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate accurate recovery of latent intensity dynamics and posterior paths, with orders-of-magnitude speedups over MCMC-based methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_24083
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Diffusion Intensity Models for Point Process Data
Du, Xinlong
Honnappa, Harsha
Rao, Vinayak
Machine Learning
Probability
Cox processes model overdispersed point process data via a latent stochastic intensity, but both nonparametric estimation of the intensity model and posterior inference over intensity paths are typically intractable, relying on expensive MCMC methods. We introduce Neural Diffusion Intensity Models, a variational framework for Cox processes driven by neural SDEs. Our key theoretical result, based on enlargement of filtrations, shows that conditioning on point process observations preserves the diffusion structure of the latent intensity with an explicit drift correction. This guarantees the variational family contains the true posterior, so that ELBO maximization coincides with maximum likelihood estimation under sufficient model capacity. We design an amortized encoder architecture that maps variable-length event sequences to posterior intensity paths by simulating the drift-corrected SDE, replacing repeated MCMC runs with a single forward pass. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate accurate recovery of latent intensity dynamics and posterior paths, with orders-of-magnitude speedups over MCMC-based methods.
title Neural Diffusion Intensity Models for Point Process Data
topic Machine Learning
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.24083