Applied probability is a broad research area that is of interest to scientists in diverse disciplines in science and technology, including: anthropology, biology, communication theory, economics, epidemiology, finance, geography, linguistics, medicine, meteorology, operations research, psychology, quality control, sociology, and statistics. Recent Advances in Applied Probability is a collection of survey articles that bring together the work of leading researchers in applied probability to present current research advances in this important area. This volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers whose research is closely connected to probability modelling and their applications. It is suitable for one semester graduate level research seminar in applied probability.

The study of scan statistics and their applications to many different scientific and engineering problems have received considerable attention in the literature recently. In addition to challenging theoretical problems, the area of scan statis tics has also found exciting applications in diverse disciplines such as archaeol ogy, astronomy, epidemiology, geography, material science, molecular biology, reconnaissance, reliability and quality control, sociology, and telecommunica tion. This will be clearly evident when one goes through this volume. In this volume, we have brought together a collection of experts working in this area of research in order to review some of the developments that have taken place over the years and also to present their new works and point out some open problems. With this in mind, we selected authors for this volume with some having theoretical interests and others being primarily concerned with applications of scan statistics. Our sincere hope is that this volume will thus provide a comprehensive survey of all the developments in this area of research and hence will serve as a valuable source as well as reference for theoreticians and applied researchers. Graduate students interested in this area will find this volume to be particularly useful as it points out many open challenging problems that they could pursue. This volume will also be appropriate for teaching a graduate-level special course on this topic.

In many statistical applications the scientists have to analyze the occurrence of observed clusters of events in time or space. The scientists are especially interested to determine whether an observed cluster of events has occurred by chance if it is assumed that the events are distributed independently and uniformly over time or space. Applications of scan statistics have been recorded in many areas of science and technology including: geology, geography, medicine, minefield detection, molecular biology, photography, quality control and reliability theory and radio-optics.

Scan statistics is currently one of the most active and important areas of research in applied probability and statistics, having applications to a wide variety of fields: archaeology, astronomy, bioinformatics, biosurveillance, molecular biology, genetics, computer science, electrical engineering, geography, material sciences, physics, reconnaissance, reliability and quality control, telecommunication, and epidemiology. Filling a gap in the literature, this self-contained volume brings together a collection of selected chapters illustrating the depth and diversity of theory, methods and applications in the area of scan statistics.

Applied probability is a broad research area that is of interest to scientists in diverse disciplines in science and technology, including: anthropology, biology, communication theory, economics, epidemiology, finance, geography, linguistics, medicine, meteorology, operations research, psychology, quality control, sociology, and statistics. Recent Advances in Applied Probability is a collection of survey articles that bring together the work of leading researchers in applied probability to present current research advances in this important area.

This volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers whose research is closely connected to probability modelling and their applications. It is suitable for one semester graduate level research seminar in applied probability.

In many statistical applications the scientists have to analyze the occurrence of observed clusters of events in time or space. The scientists are especially interested to determine whether an observed cluster of events has occurred by chance if it is assumed that the events are distributed independently and uniformly over time or space. Applications of scan statistics have been recorded in many areas of science and technology including: geology, geography, medicine, minefield detection, molecular biology, photography, quality control and reliability theory and radio-optics.

The study of scan statistics and their applications to many different scientific and engineering problems have received considerable attention in the literature recently. In addition to challenging theoretical problems, the area of scan statis tics has also found exciting applications in diverse disciplines such as archaeol ogy, astronomy, epidemiology, geography, material science, molecular biology, reconnaissance, reliability and quality control, sociology, and telecommunica tion. This will be clearly evident when one goes through this volume. In this volume, we have brought together a collection of experts working in this area of research in order to review some of the developments that have taken place over the years and also to present their new works and point out some open problems. With this in mind, we selected authors for this volume with some having theoretical interests and others being primarily concerned with applications of scan statistics. Our sincere hope is that this volume will thus provide a comprehensive survey of all the developments in this area of research and hence will serve as a valuable source as well as reference for theoreticians and applied researchers. Graduate students interested in this area will find this volume to be particularly useful as it points out many open challenging problems that they could pursue. This volume will also be appropriate for teaching a graduate-level special course on this topic."