Conditional Uniformity and Hawkes Processes

Abstract

Classic results show that the Hawkes self-exciting point process can be viewed as a collection of temporal clusters, in which exogenously generated initial events give rise to endogenously driven descendant events. This perspective provides the distribution of a cluster’s size through a natural connection to branching processes, but this is irrespective of time. Insight into the chronology of a Hawkes process cluster has been much more elusive. Here, we employ this cluster perspective and a novel adaptation of the random time change theorem to establish an analog of the conditional uniformity property enjoyed by Poisson processes. Conditional on the number of epochs in a cluster, we show that the transformed times are jointly uniform within a particular convex polytope. Furthermore, we find that this polytope leads to a surprising connection between these continuous state clusters and parking functions, discrete objects central in enumerative combinatorics and closely related to Dyck paths on the lattice. In particular, we show that uniformly random parking functions constitute hidden spines within Hawkes process clusters. This yields a decomposition that is valuable both methodologically and practically, which we demonstrate through application to the popular Markovian Hawkes model and proposal of a flexible and efficient simulation algorithm.