Each week, we select a recently published Open Access article to feature. This week’s article comes from the Scandinavian Journal of Statistics and looks into Bayesian state estimation. 

The article’s abstract is given below, with the full article available to read here.  

Lieshout, M. N. M. v. a. n., & Markwitz, R. L. (2022). State estimation for aoristic models. Scand J Statist, 1– 22. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjos.12619

Aoristic data can be described by a marked point process in time in which the points cannot be observed directly but are known to lie in observable intervals, the marks. We consider Bayesian state estimation for the latent points when the marks are modeled in terms of an alternating renewal process in equilibrium and the prior is a Markov point process. We derive the posterior distribution, estimate its parameters and present some examples that illustrate the influence of the prior distribution. The model is then used to estimate times of occurrence of interval censored crimes.