  The Leonids show meteor storms in a period of 33 years, and known as one of
the most active meteor showers. It has recently shown a meteor stream
consisting of several narrow dust trails made by meteoroids ejected from a
parent comet. Hence, an analysis of the temporal behavior of the meteor flux is
important to study the structure of the trails. However, statistical inference
for the count data is not an easy task, because of its Poisson characteristics.
We carried out a wide-field video observation of the Leonid meteor storm in
2001. We formulated a state-of-the-art statistical analysis, which is called a
self-organizing state space model, to infer the true behavior of the dust
density of the trails properly from the meteor count data. {}From this
analysis, we found that the trails have a fairly smooth spatial structure, with
small and dense clumps that cause a temporal burst of meteor flux. We also
proved that the time behavior (trend) of the fluxes of bright meteors and that
of faint meteors are significantly different. In addition we comment on some
other application of the self-organizing state-space model in fields related to
astronomy and astrophysics.
