A competing risks interpretation of Hawkes processes.

We give a construction of the Hawkes process as a piecewise competing risks model. We argue that the most natural interpretation of the self-excitation kernel is the hazard function of a defective random variable. This establishes a link between desired qualitative features of the process and a parametric form for the kernel, which we illustrate using examples from the literature. Two families of cure rate models taken from the survival analysis literature are proposed as new models for the self-excitation kernel. Finally, we show that the competing risks viewpoint leads to a general simulation algorithm which avoids inverting the compensator of the point process or performing an accept-reject step, and is therefore fast and quite general.