Infill asymptotics and bandwidth selection for kernel estimators of spatial intensity functions

Abstract: We investigate the asymptotic mean squared error of kernel estimators of the intensity function of a spatial point process. We show that when $n$ independent copies of a point process in $\mathbb R<sup>d$ are superposed, the optimal bandwidth $h_n$ is of the order $n<sup>{-1/(d+4)}$ under appropriate smoothness conditions on the kernel and true intensity function. We apply the Abramson principle to define adaptive kernel estimators and show that asymptotically the optimal adaptive bandwidth is of the order $n<sup>{-1/(d+8)}$ under appropriate smoothness conditions.