Simulating correlated marked-point processes

The area of marked-point processes is well developed but simulation is still a challenging problem when mark correlations are to be included. In this paper we propose the use of simulated annealing to incorporate the spatial mark correlation into the simulations of correlated marked-point processes. Such a simulation has wide applications in areas such as inference and goodness-of-fit investigations of proposed models. The technique is applied to a forest dataset for which the results are extremely encouraging.