Mechanistic Spatio-Temporal Point Process Models for Marked Point Processes, with a View to Forest Stand Data

We show how a spatial point process, where to each point there is associated a random quantitative mark, can be identified with a spatio-temporal point process specified by a conditional intensity function. For instance, the points can be tree locations, the marks can express the size of trees, and the conditional intensity function can describe the distribution of a tree (i.e., its location and size) conditionally on the larger trees. This enable us to construct parametric statistical models which are easily interpretable and where maximum-likelihood-based inference is tractable.