ON AREA-INTERACTION PROCESSES

                    Aila Särkkä

           CTH och Göteborgs Universitet


Area-interaction point processes, a generalisation of
Widom-Rowlinson's (1970) penetrable sphere model were
introduced by Baddeley and van Lieshout (1995). They
are a special class of Markov point processes with
interactions of infinite order. Area-interaction
processes are a feasible model both for regular and
clustered point patterns. Simulation of the processes 
has recently been of interest (Häggström et al., 1996;
Kendall, 1996) but very little attention has been paid
to parameter estimation and model fitting. We will
concentrate on these two latter topics.