When events of temporal point processes are too close to each other they can be erased by dead-time effects. Among various possible mechanisms of dead-time, the output dead-time is the most important. Dead-time effects modify the statistical properties of point processes and some of these modifications are analyzed in this article. To do so, we note that a point process is defined by the distance between its successive points called life-time which constitutes a discrete time positive signal. The dead-time mechanism is a system which transforms such a signal into another discrete time positive signal. Except in very specific cases this transformation cannot be expressed in closed form. We show, however, that it can be written in a recursive form analogous to the state representation of systems. By using this recursion, various statistical properties of point processes with dead-time are analyzed in computer experiments. In this study, we focus on the probability distribution of the intervals between point...
['Bernard C. Picinbono']
Output Dead-Time in Point Processes