Classification of Mixtures of Spatial Point Processes via Partial Bayes Factors

Abstract

Motivated by the problem of minefield detection, we investigate the problem of classifying mixtures of spatial point processes. In particular we are interested in testing the hypothesis that a given dataset was generated by a Poisson process versus a mixture of a Poisson process and a hard-core Strauss process. We propose testing this hypothesis by comparing the evidence for each model by using partial Bayes factors. We use the term partial Bayes factor to describe a Bayes factor, a ratio of integrated likelihoods, based on only part of the available information, namely that information contained in a small number of functionals of the data. We applied our method to both real and simulated data, and considering the difficulty of classifying these point patterns by eye, our approach overall produced good results.