Zero Inflated Poisson Distribution: What it is
The zero-inflated Poisson distributio n is a mixture of a point mass at zero and a Poisson distribution. It is suitable when there is a significant number of zero values in the dataset, and a few datapoints have large values. This distribution allows for the excess of zeros and captures the occurrence of larger values. Intuition Imagine you have a dataset that represents the number of events that happen within a certain time or space, like the number of cars passing by a particular street in an hour. Usually, many hours will have no cars passing by, and only a few hours will have some cars passing by. The Zero-Inflated Poisson Distribution is a way to describe this kind of dataset. It combines two ideas to better represent the data: Lots of Zeroes : First, it acknowledges that many hours have no cars passing by. These zero counts are more common than any other number of cars. So, it considers two possibilities: either there are no cars at all (zero count) or the usual Poisson distrib