A Flexible Semi-Poisson Distribution with Applications to Insurance Claims and Biological Data

Abstract

In this paper, a discrete one-parameter distribution called the semi-Poisson distribution is introduced, which is based on a set of non-negative integers. It is seen that this distribution captures over-dispersion and zero-inflation scenarios well. A few properties of the proposed distribution, such as moments, the probability-generating function, index of dispersion, recurrence relation for the moments, and negative moments are presented. The distribution is applied to two real-life datasets related to insurance claims and parasite counts, where it is noted to perform better than many of the existing discrete distributions based on Z+, including some of the recently introduced ones.

Keywords

• discrete distributions
• over-dispersion
• recurrence relation for the moments
• entropy
• estimation
• simulation