Model Selection for Time Series Count Data with Over-Dispersion

Time series of count with over-dispersion is the reality often encountered in many biomedical and public health applications. Statistical modelling of this type of series has been a great challenge. Rottenly, the Poisson and negative binomial distributions have been widely used in practice for discrete count time series data, their forms are too simplistic to accommodate features such as over-dispersion. Unable to account for these associated features while analyzing such data may result in incorrect and sometimes misleading inferences as well as detection of spurious associations. Therefore, the need for further investigation of count time series models suitable to fit count time series with over-dispersion of different level. The study therefore proposed a best model that can fit and forecast time series count data with different levels of over-dispersion and sample sizes Simulation studies were conducted using R statistical package, to investigate the performances of Autoregressiove Conditional Poisson (ACP) and Poisson Autoregressive (PAR) models. The predictive ability of the models were observed at different steps ahead. The relative performance of the models were examined using Akaike Information criteria (AIC) and Hannan-Quinn Information Criteria (HQIC). Conclusively, the best model to fit was ACP at different sample sizes. The predictive abilities of the four fitted models increased as sample size and number of steps ahead were increased