Exact and Asymptotic Analysis of General Multivariate Hawkes Processes and Induced Population Processes

Abstract: This paper considers population processes in which general, not necessarily Markovian, multivariate Hawkes processes dictate the stochastic arrivals. We establish results to determine the corresponding time-dependent joint probability distribution, allowing for general intensity decay functions, general intensity jumps, and general sojourn times. We obtain an exact, full characterization of the time-dependent joint transform of the multivariate population process and its underlying intensity process in terms of a fixed-point representation and corresponding convergence results. We also derive the asymptotic tail behavior of the population process and its underlying intensity process in the setting of heavy-tailed intensity jumps. By exploiting the results we establish, arbitrary joint spatial-temporal moments and other distributional properties can now be readily evaluated using standard transform differentiation and inversion techniques, and we illustrate this in a few examples.