This tutorial provides an introduction to conditioning in spatial point processes or so-called Palm distributions. Initially, in the context of finite point processes, we give an explicit definition of Palm distributions in terms of their density functions. Then we review Palm distributions in the general case. Finally we discuss some examples of specific models and applications.

Keywords: Cox process; Gibbs process; joint intensities; log Gaussian Cox process; Palm likelihood; reduced Palm distribution; shot noise Cox processes; summary statistics.