Bayesian Analysis of a Zero-inflated Poisson Regression Model: An Application to Korean Oral Hygienic Data

We consider zero-inflated count data, which is discrete count data but has too many zeroes compared to the Poisson distribution. Zero-inflated data can be found in various areas. Despite its increasing importance in practice, appropriate statistical inference on zero-inflated data is limited. Classical inference based on a large number theory does not fit unless the sample size is very large. And regular Poisson model shows lack of fit due to many zeroes. To handle the difficulties, a mixture of distributions are considered for the zero-inflated data. Specifically, a mixture of a point mass at zero and a Poisson distribution is employed for the data. In addition, when there exist meaningful covariates selected to the response variable, loglinear link is used between the mean of the response and the covariates in the Poisson distribution part. We propose a Bayesian inference for the zero-inflated Poisson regression model by using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. We applied the proposed method to a Korean oral hygienic data and compared the inference results with other models. We found that the proposed method is superior in that it gives small parameter estimation error and more accurate predictions.