Some new statistical methods for a class of zero-truncated discrete distributions with applications

Abstract

Counting data without zero category often occur in various _elds. Examples include days of hospital stay for patients, numbers of publication for tenure-tracked faculty in a university, numbers of tra_c violation for drivers during a certain period and so on. A class of zero-truncated discrete models such as zero-truncated Poisson, zero-truncated binomial and zero-truncated negative-binomial distributions are proposed in literature to model such count data. In this thesis, firstly, literature review is presented in Chapter 1 on a class of commonly used univariate zero-truncated discrete distributions.

In Chapter 2, a unified method is proposed to derive the distribution of the sum of i.i.d. zero-truncated distribution random variables, which has important applications in the construction of the shortest Clopper-Person confidence intervals of parameters of interest and in the calculation of the exact p-value of a two-sided test for small sample sizes in one sample problem. These problems are discussed in Section 2.4. Then a novel expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is developed for calculating the maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) of parameters in general zero-truncated discrete distributions. An important feature of the proposed EM algorithm is that the latent variables and the observed variables are independent, which is unusual in general EM-type algorithms. In addition, a unified minorization-maximization (MM) algorithm for obtaining the MLEs of parameters in a class of zero-truncated discrete distributions is provided.

The first objective of Chapter 3 is to propose the multivariate zero-truncated Charlier series (ZTCS) distribution by developing its important distributional properties, and providing efficient MLE methods via a novel data augmentation in the framework of the EM algorithm. Since the joint marginal distribution of any r-dimensional sub-vector of the multivariate ZTCS random vector of dimension m is an r-dimensional zero-deated Charlier series (ZDCS) distribution (1 6 r < m), it is the second objective of Chapter 3 to propose a new family of multivariate zero-adjusted Charlier series (ZACS) distributions (including the multivariate ZDCS distribution as a special member) with a more flexible correlation structure by accounting for both inflation and deflation at zero. The corresponding distributional properties are explored and the associated MLE method via EM algorithm is provided for analyzing correlated count data.