An up-to-date review of scan statistics∗

Abstract

Scan statistics have been a very important and active area of statistical research in the past three decades. Detecting areas with a significant concentration of points is an important task in understanding the underlying phenomena in many fields such as: epidemiology, politics, crime analysis, zoology, etc. This study reviews how scan statistics have developed in the last three decades, the main concerns of researchers in scan statistics, and how researchers have approached these concerns.