Properties and applications of the Poisson-reciprocal inverse Gaussian distribution

Abstract

The barely known continuous reciprocal inverse Gaussian distribution is used in this paper to introduce the Poisson-reciprocal inverse Gaussian discrete distribution. Several of its most relevant statistical properties are examined, some of them directly inherited from the reciprocal of the inverse Gaussian distribution. Furthermore, a mixed Poisson regression model that uses the reciprocal inverse Gaussian as mixing distribution is presented. Parameters estimation in this regression model is performed via an EM type algorithm. In light of the numerical results displayed in the paper, the distributions introduced in this work are competitive with the classical negative binomial and Poisson-inverse Gaussian distributions.