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Concept
Poisson point process
Summary
In probability, statistics and related fields, a Poisson point process is a type of random mathematical object that consists of points randomly located on a mathematical space with the essential feature that the points occur independently of one another. The Poisson point process is often called simply the Poisson process, but it is also called a Poisson random measure, Poisson random point field or Poisson point field. This point process has convenient mathematical properties, which has led to its being frequently defined in Euclidean space and used as a mathematical model for seemingly random processes in numerous disciplines such as astronomy, biology, ecology, geology, seismology, physics, economics, , and telecommunications.
The process is named after French mathematician Siméon Denis Poisson despite Poisson's never having studied the process. Its name derives from the fact that if a collection of random points in some space forms a Poisson process, then the number of points in a region of finite size is a random variable with a Poisson distribution. The process was discovered independently and repeatedly in several settings, including experiments on radioactive decay, telephone call arrivals and insurance mathematics.
The Poisson point process is often defined on the real line, where it can be considered as a stochastic process. In this setting, it is used, for example, in queueing theory to model random events, such as the arrival of customers at a store, phone calls at an exchange or occurrence of earthquakes, distributed in time. In the plane, the point process, also known as a spatial Poisson process, can represent the locations of scattered objects such as transmitters in a wireless network, particles colliding into a detector, or trees in a forest. In this setting, the process is often used in mathematical models and in the related fields of spatial point processes, stochastic geometry, spatial statistics and continuum percolation theory. The Poisson point process can be defined on more abstract spaces.
Official source
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