ABSTRACT
Define a study area as T and within that area m event of disease occur. These events are usually address locations of the cases. The case could be an incident or prevalent case or could be a death certificate address. We assume at present that the cases are geo-coded down to a point (with respect to the scale of the total study region). Hence they form a point process in space. Define {si}, i = 1, ...,m as the set of all cases within T. This is called a realization of the disease process, in that we assume that all cases within the study area are recorded. This is a common form of data available from government agencies. Sub-samples of the spatial domain, where incomplete realizations are taken are not considered at this point.
