A novel family of non-parametric cumulative based divergences for point processes

Seth, Sohan, Il, Park, Brockmeier, Austin, Semework, Mulugeta, Choi, John, Francis, Joseph, Principe, Jose

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Hypothesis testing on point processes has several applications such as model fitting, plasticity detection, and non-stationarity detection. Standard tools for hypothesis testing include tests on mean firing rate and time varying rate function. However, these statistics do not fully describe a point process and thus the tests can be misleading. In this paper, we introduce a family of non-parametric divergence measures for hypothesis testing. We extend the traditional Kolmogorov--Smirnov and Cramer--von-Mises tests for point process via stratification.