The model-fitting function ppm
fits point process
models to point pattern data. However,
only the regular parameters of the model can be fitted by
ppm
. The model may also depend on irregular
parameters that must be fixed in any call to ppm
. This function profilepl
is a wrapper which finds the values of the
irregular parameters that give the best fit.
If aic=FALSE
(the default),
the best fit is the model which maximises the
likelihood (if the models are Poisson processes) or maximises
the pseudolikelihood or logistic likelihood.
If aic=TRUE
then the best fit is the model which
minimises the Akaike Information Criterion AIC.ppm
.
The argument s
must be a data frame whose columns contain
values of the irregular parameters over which the maximisation is
to be performed.
An irregular parameter may affect either the interpoint interaction
or the spatial trend.
The argument f
determines the interaction
for each model to be fitted. It would typically be one of the functions
Poisson
,
AreaInter
,
BadGey
,
DiggleGatesStibbard
,
DiggleGratton
,
Fiksel
,
Geyer
,
Hardcore
,
LennardJones
,
OrdThresh
,
Softcore
,
Strauss
or
StraussHard
.
Alternatively it could be a function written by the user.
Columns of s
which match the names of arguments of f
will be interpreted as interaction parameters. Other columns will be
interpreted as trend parameters.
The data frame s
must provide values for each argument of
f
, except for the optional arguments, which are those arguments of
f
that have the default value NA
.
To find the best fit,
each row of s
will be taken in turn. Interaction parameters in this
row will be passed to f
, resulting in an interaction object.
Then ppm
will be applied to the data ...
using this interaction. Any trend parameters will be passed to
ppm
through the argument covfunargs
.
This results in a fitted point process model.
The value of the log pseudolikelihood or AIC from this model is stored.
After all rows of s
have been processed in this way, the
row giving the maximum value of log pseudolikelihood will be found.
The object returned by profilepl
contains the profile
pseudolikelihood (or profile AIC) function,
the best fitting model, and other data.
It can be plotted (yielding a
plot of the log pseudolikelihood or AIC values against the irregular
parameters) or printed (yielding information about the best fitting
values of the irregular parameters).
In general, f
may be any function that will return
an interaction object (object of class "interact"
)
that can be used in a call to ppm
. Each argument of
f
must be a single value.