Is One Shooting Predictable After Another Shooting? Can We Predict Clusters of Cases of Disease?

What a quirky little model suggests.

Imagine you're trying to model the next big earthquake. Or a viral TikTok trend. Or, more somberly, a string of shootings in a city. Each of these has something in common: the fact that one event tends to stir up more events nearby, in time or space. It’s the kind of ripple effect we often sense but rarely quantify well. Enter: the Hawkes process.

If tha…