Friday, April 13, 2012

Count Data & the Hermite Distribution

One of the limitations of the usual discrete distributions that we use when modeling "count data" is that they can't allow for multi-modality (except in a trivial manner). So, there's no use in trying to model multi-modal data using a Poisson regression  model, or a Negative Binomial regression model, for example.

However, such data occur frequently in practice. So, what options are open to us?