Gaussian Process Modulated Renewal Processes

Abstract

Renewal processes are generalizations of the Poisson process on the real line, whose intervals are drawn i.i.d. from some distribution. Modulated renewal processes allow these distributions to vary with time, allowing the introduction nonstationarity. In this work, we take a nonparametric Bayesian approach, modeling this nonstationarity with a Gaussian process. Our approach is based on the idea of uniformization, allowing us to draw exact samples from an otherwise intractable distribution. We develop a novel and efficient MCMC sampler for posterior inference. In our experiments, we test these on a number of synthetic and real datasets.