State-space models for count time series with excess zeros

Count time series are frequently encountered in biomedical, epidemiological and public health applications. In principle, such series may exhibit three distinctive features: overdispersion, zero-inflation and temporal correlation. Developing a modelling framework that is sufficiently general to accommodate all three of these characteristics poses a challenge. To address this challenge, we propose a flexible class of dynamic models in the state-space framework. Certain models that have been previously introduced in the literature may be viewed as special cases of this model class. For parameter estimation, we devise a Monte Carlo Expectation-Maximization (MCEM) algorithm, where particle filtering and particle smoothing methods are employed to approximate the high-dimensional integrals in the E-step of the algorithm. To illustrate the proposed methodology, we consider an application based on the evaluation of a participatory ergonomics intervention, which is designed to reduce the incidence of workplace injuries among a group of hospital cleaners. The data consists of aggregated monthly counts of work-related injuries that were reported before and after the intervention.