Detecting change-points and trends are common tasks in the analysis of remote sensing data. Over the years, many different methods have been proposed for those purposes, including (modified) Mann–Kendall and Cox–Stuart tests for detecting trends; and Pettitt, Buishand range, Buishand U, standard normal homogeneity (Snh), Meanvar, structure change (Strucchange), breaks for additive season and trend (BFAST), and hierarchical divisive (E.divisive) for detecting change-points. In this paper, we describe a simulation study based on including different artificial, abrupt changes at different time-periods of image time series to assess the performances of such methods. The power of the test, type I error probability, and mean absolute error (MAE) were used as performance criteria, although MAE was only calculated for change-point detection methods. The study reveals that if the magnitude of change (or trend slope) is high, and/or the change does not occur in the first or last time-periods, the methods generally have a high power and a low MAE. However, in the presence of temporal autocorrelation, MAE raises, and the probability of introducing false positives increases noticeably. The modified versions of the Mann–Kendall method for autocorrelated data reduce/moderate its type I error probability, but this reduction comes with an important power diminution. In conclusion, taking a trade-off between the power of the test and type I error probability, we conclude that the original Mann–Kendall test is generally the preferable choice. Although Mann–Kendall is not able to identify the time-period of abrupt changes, it is more reliable than other methods when detecting the existence of such changes. Finally, we look for trend/change-points in land surface temperature (LST), day and night, via monthly MODIS images in Navarre, Spain, from January 2001 to December 2018.

Voronoi estimators are non-parametric and adaptive estimators of the intensity of a point process. The intensity estimate at a given location is equal to the reciprocal of the size of the Voronoi/Dirichlet cell containing that location. Their major drawback is that they tend to paradoxically under-smooth the data in regions where the point density of the observed point pattern is high, and over-smooth where the point density is low. To remedy this behaviour, we propose to apply an additional smoothing operation to the Voronoi estimator, based on resampling the point pattern by independent random thinning. Through a simulation study we show that our resample-smoothing technique improves the estimation substantially. In addition, we study statistical properties such as unbiasedness and variance, and propose a rule-of-thumb and a data-driven cross-validation approach to choose the amount of smoothing to apply. Finally we apply our proposed intensity estimation scheme to two datasets: locations of pine saplings (planar point pattern) and motor vehicle traffic accidents (linear network point pattern).

We present several characteristics for spatio-temporal point patterns when the spatial locations are restricted to a linear network. A non-parametric kernel-based intensity estimator is proposed to highlight the concentration of events within the network and time, either jointly or separately. We also provide second-order characteristics for spatio-temporal point patterns on linear networks such as K-function and pair correlation function to analyse the type of interaction between points. They are independent of network’s geometry and have known values for Poisson point processes. Finally, we consider some applications to traffic accidents and demonstrate our findings by analysing datasets of Houston (US), Medellín (Colombia) and Eastbourne (UK).

We propose an extension of Diggle’s nonparametric edge-corrected kernel-based intensity estimator to the case of events coming from an inhomogenous point pattern on a linear network. We analyze its statistical properties, showing that it is an unbiased estimator of the first-order intensity; we also provide an expression for the variance, and comment on the appropriate bandwidth selection. Our estimator is compared with the current existing equal-split discontinuous kernel density estimator in terms of the mean integrated squared error (MISE). We then use our estimator on two real datasets. We first revisit street crimes in an area of Chicago, obtaining similar results to previously published ones based on a parametric intensity function. Then, we study network-based spatial events consisting of calls to the Police department reporting anti-social behavior in the city of Castellon (Spain).