Introduction to the Theory of Gibbs Point Processes

The Gibbs point processes (GPP) constitute a large class of point processes with interaction between the points. The interaction can be attractive, repulsive, depending on geometrical features whereas the null interaction is associated with the so-called Poisson point process. In a first part of this mini-course, we present several aspects of finite volume GPP defined on a bounded window in R-d. In a second part, we introduce the more complicated formalism of infinite volume GPP defined on the full space Rd. Existence, uniqueness and non-uniqueness of GPP are non-trivial questions which we treat here with completely self-contained proofs. The DLR equations, the GNZ equations and the variational principle are presented as well. Finally we investigate the estimation of parameters. The main standard estimators (MLE, MPLE, Takacs-Fiksel and variational estimators) are presented and we prove their consistency. For sake of simplicity, during all the mini-course, we consider only the case of finite range interaction and the setting of marked points is not presented.