B-splines and discretization in an inverse problem for Poisson processes

Recent results on quasi-maximum likelihood histogram sieve estimators in inverse problems for Poisson processes are generalized to B-spline sieves. The impact of discretization effects on strong L-2 consistency and convergence rates are studied in detail. In particular, a "rates saturation effect", caused by discretization, is demonstrated. Finite-sample implementation is proposed and tested in a Monte Carlo experiment with the Wicksell problem, which shows a superior performance of the new approach, when compared to other methods commonly used in that context. The proposed algorithm can also be used in cases with only approximately known folding kernel. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.