Renewal Hawkes Processes: Expectations and Applications

Abstract: Hawkes processes are point processes with self-exciting and clustering properties that are popular in applications. In recent years, renewal Hawkes processes have gained attention, due to their versatility such as the capability of capturing dependence between clusters. In this paper, three classes of novel renewal Hawkes processes are introduced after incorporating exogenous and endogenous renewal factors. The relationship among five related Hawkes processes is studied. The expectations of the three classes of renewal Hawkes processes are derived by establishing a set of integral equations. A general common renewal equation for these expectations is derived and further discussions are provided. The special case of constant exogenous factor is discussed as well for the three proposed Hawkes processes. Finally, we apply our proposed models to study the optimization problems that arise in a periodic replacement policy for systems with cascading failures and provide numerical illustrations. The numerical solutions rely on computing the expectations of the proposed renewal Hawkes processes that can be efficiently obtained by using the direct Riemann integration method.