Point Patterns II
Content for Wednesday, October 15, 2025
We’ll continue our discussion of point patterns by looking at second-order effects and approaches for incorporating “marks” into our analysis.
Resources
Bigger Picture
Point process models for presence-only analysis by (Renner et al. 2015) has an excellent overview of ways to treat presence-only data (i.e., things from citizen science datasets, herbariums, arrest locations, etc where there was not a systematic sample for presences and absences) in a point process modeling framework.
Spatial Point Pattern Analysis and Its Application in Geographical Epidemiology by (Gatrell et al. 1996) provides a broad overview of point patterns and processes along with some extensions and critiques based on the nature of epidemiological data. Some important points here for anyone thinking about a process that might be considered “contagious” (or spreading).
Technical Details
Chapters 17 and 18 on Spatial Point Processes and the
spatstatpackage in Paula Moraga’s book Spatial Statistics for Data Science: Theory and Practice with R.Chapter 11 in (Pebesma and Bivand 2023) illustrates the interaction between the
sfpackage andspatstatpackage for point pattern analysis.
Objectives
By the end of today you should be able to:
Recognize the linkage between point process models and the Poisson Distribution
Differentiate between first- and second-order effects in point processes
Simulate point patterns and use density and distance functions to assess first- and second-order effects
Slides
The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.