Modelling multivariate, overdispersed count data with correlated and non-normal heterogeneity effects

Mixed Poisson models are most relevant to the analysis of longitudinal count data in various disciplines. A conventional specification of such models relies on the normality of unobserved heterogeneity effects. In practice, such an assumption may be invalid, and non-normal cases are appealing. In th...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Kazemi, Iraj|||0000-0002-8876-9003, Hassanzadeh, Fatemeh
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:235237
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/235237
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.2436/20.8080.02.105
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Bayesian computation
Correlated random effects
Hierarchical representation
Longitudinal data
Multivariate skew-normal distribution
Over-dispersion
Descripción
Sumario:Mixed Poisson models are most relevant to the analysis of longitudinal count data in various disciplines. A conventional specification of such models relies on the normality of unobserved heterogeneity effects. In practice, such an assumption may be invalid, and non-normal cases are appealing. In this paper, we propose a modelling strategy by allowing the vector of effects to follow the multivariate skew-normal distribution. It can produce dependence between the correlated longitudinal counts by imposing several structures of mixing priors. In a Bayesian setting, the estimation process proceeds by sampling variants from the posterior distributions. We highlight the usefulness of our approach by conducting a simulation study and analysing two real-life data sets taken from the German Socioeconomic Panel and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By a comparative study, we indicate that the new approach can produce more reliable results compared to traditional mixed models to fit correlated count data.