Thinning of Point Processes—Martingale Method

Abstract

By using the martingale method, we show that thinning of an arbitrary point process produces independent thinned processes if and only if the original point process is (nonhomogeneous) Poisson. Thinning is a classical problem for point processes. It is well-known that independent homogeneous Poisson processes result from constant Bernoulli thinnings of homogeneous Poisson processes. In fact, the conclusion remains true for nonconstant Bernoulli thinnings of nonhomogeneous Poisson processes. processes. In fact, the conclusion remains true for nonconstant Bernoulli thinnings of nonhomogeneous Poisson processes. It is easy to see that the converse is also true, i.e., if the thinned processes are independent nonhomogeneous Poisson processes, so are the original processes. But if we only suppose the thinned processes are independent, nothing is concerned with their distribution law, the problem of whether or not the original processes are (nonhomogeneous) Poisson becomes interesting and challenging, which is the objective of this paper. It is considerably surprising for us to arrive at the affirmative answer. So far as this problem is concerned, the most work was done under the renewal assumption. For example, Bremaud [1] showed that for arbitrary delayed renewal processes, the existence of a pair of uncorrelated thinned processes is sufficient to guarantee that the original process is Poisson. It is natural that the mathematical tools to solve the problem in this case be typical ones for renewal theory, such as renewal equations and Laplace-Stieltjes transformations. Obviously, they are not available for nonrenewal processes. We find out that the martingale method is the most efficient one to solve this problem in the general case. More precisely, we use mainly the dual predictable projections of point processes. In fact, the distribution law of a point process is determined uniquely by its dual predictable projection (see [5]), and Ma [6] offered us a very useful criterion of independence of jump processes having no common jump time through their dual predictable projections. Based on these results, it is not a long way to arrive at the destination.