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MaPhySto
Centre for Mathematical Physics and Stochastics
Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Aarhus

Funded by The Danish National Research Foundation

MPS-RR 2002-30
September 2002




Bayesian Analysis of Deformed Tessellation Models

by:

Jesper Møller

Paul G. Blackwell

Abstract

We define a class of tessellation models based on perturbing or deforming standard tessellations such as the Voronoi tessellation. We show how distributions over this class of `deformed' tessellations can be used to define prior distributions for models based on tessellations, and how inference for such models can be carried out using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods; stability properties of the algorithms are investigated. Our approach applies not only to fixed dimension problems, but also to variable dimension problems, in which the number of cells in the tessellation is unknown. We illustrate our methods with two real examples. The first relates to reconstructing animal territories, represented by the individual cells of a tessellation, from observation of an inhomogeneous Poisson point process. The second example involves the analysis of an image of a cross-section through a sample of metal, with the tessellation modelling the micro-crystalline structure of the metal.

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This paper has now been published in Advances in Applied Probability 35, 4 - 26 (2003)