Overview

The Tweedie compound Poisson distribution is a mixture of a degenerate distribution at the origin and a continuous distribution on the positive real line. It has been applied in a wide range of fields in which continuous data with exact zeros regularly arise. Nevertheless, statistical inference based on full likelihood and Bayesian methods is not available in most statistical software, largely because the distribution has an intractable density function and numerical methods that allow fast and accurate evaluation of the density did not appear until fairly recently. The cplm package provides likelihood-based and Bayesian procedures for fitting common Tweedie compound Poisson linear models. In particular, models with hierarchical structures or extra zero inflation can be handled. Further, the package implements the Gini index based on an ordered version of the Lorenz curve as a robust model comparison tool involving zero-inflated and highly skewed distributions.

Reference

Zhang, Yanwei (2013). Likelihood-based and Bayesian Methods for Tweedie Compound Poisson Linear Mixed Models, Statistics and Computing, 23, 743-757.