Mean-parametrized Conway-Maxwell-Poisson regression models for dispersed counts

Abstract: Conway-Maxwell-Poisson (CMP) distributions are flexible generalizations of the Poisson distribution for modelling overdispersed or underdispersed counts. The main hindrance to their wider use in practice seems to be the inability to directly model the mean of counts, making them not compatible with nor comparable to competing count regression models, such as the log-linear Poisson, negative-binomial or generalized Poisson regression models. This note illustrates how CMP distributions can be parametrized via the mean, so that simpler and more easily-interpretable mean-models can be used, such as a log-linear model. Other link functions are also available, of course. In addition to establishing attractive theoretical and asymptotic properties of the proposed model, its good finite-sample performance is exhibited through various examples and a simulation study based on real datasets. Moreover, the MATLAB routine to fit the model to data is demonstrated to be up to an order of magnitude faster than the current software to fit standard CMP models, and over two orders of magnitude faster than the recently proposed hyper-Poisson model.