Distribution-free estimation of zero-inflated models with unobserved heterogeneity
Statistical Methods in Medical Research: An International Review Journal
Published online on June 24, 2015
Abstract
This paper presents a quasi-conditional likelihood method for the consistent estimation of both continuous and count data models with excess zeros and unobserved individual heterogeneity when the true data generating process is unknown. Monte Carlo simulation studies show that our zero-inflated quasi-conditional maximum likelihood (ZI-QCML) estimator outperforms other methods and is robust to distributional misspecifications. We apply the ZI-QCML estimator to analyze the frequency of doctor visits.