Analysis of spatio-temporal point patterns with replication

We develop and apply several methods for the analysis of replicated spatio-temporal point patterns in order to identify structural differences between groups of them. First, we calculate a number of functional descriptors of each spatio-temporal pattern to investigate departures from completely random patterns, both among subjects and groups. The distributions of our functional descriptors and of our derived test statistics are unknown, so for the nonparametric inference we use bootstrap and permutation procedures to estimate the null distribution of our test statistics, even though the null hypothesis is not supported by these data. A simulation study provides evidence of the validity and power of our procedures.