Lesson 3:
Spatio-Temporal Point Patterns Analysis (STPPA)

Dr. Kam Tin Seong
Assoc. Professor of Information Systems (Practice)

School of Computing and Information Systems,
Singapore Management University

07 Sep 2025

Content

  • Basic concepts of Spatio-Temporal Point Process
  • Spatio-Temporal Kernel Density Estimation

What is a Spatio-Temporal Point Process

A spatio-temporal point process (also called space-time or spatial-temporal point process) is a random collection of points, where each point represents the time and location of an event. Examples of events include incidence of disease, sightings or births of a species, or the occurrences of fires, earthquakes, lightning strikes, tsunamis, or volcanic eruptions. Typically the spatio-temporal point events are recorded in three-dimension, namely: longitude, latitude, and time as shown in the figure below.

Real world spatio-temporal point events

Snapshots of confirmed COVID-19 cases at four particular weeks in Cali, Columbia. Each dot represents the location of a confirmed case. Note that darker dots indicate multiple dots being overlapped

Spatio-Temporal KDE (STKDE)

Mathematically, STKDE is defined as