In disease surveillance applications, the disease events are modeled by spatio-temporal point processes. We propose a new class of semiparametric generalized linear mixed model for such data, where the event rate is related to some known risk factors and some unknown latent random effects. We model the latent spatio-temporal process as spatially correlated functional data, and propose Poisson maximum likelihood and composite likelihood methods based on spline approximations to estimate the mean and covariance functions of the latent process. By performing functional principal component analysis to the latent process, we can better understand the correlation structure in the point process. We also propose an empirical Bayes method to predict the latent spatial random effects, which can help highlight hot areas with unusually high event rates. Under an increasing domain and increasing knots asymptotic framework, we establish the asymptotic distribution for the parametric components in the model and the asymptotic convergence rates for the functional principal component estimators. We illustrate the methodology through a simulation study and an application to the Connecticut Tumor Registry data.
Keywords: Composite likelihood; Functional data; Latent process; Point process; Semi-parametric methods; Spatio-temporal data; Splines; Strong mixing.