Extension of the Application of Conway-Maxwell-Poisson Models: Analyzing Traffic Crash Data Exhibiting Underdispersion

Abstract

The objective of this article is to evaluate the performance of the COM-Poisson GLM for analyzing crash data exhibiting underdispersion (when conditional on the mean). The COM-Poisson distribution, originally developed in 1962, has recently been reintroduced by statisticians for analyzing count data subjected to either over- or underdispersion. Over the last year, the COM-Poisson GLM has been evaluated in the context of crash data analysis and it has been shown that the model performs as well as the Poisson-gamma model for crash data exhibiting overdispersion. To accomplish the objective of this study, several COM-Poisson models were estimated using crash data collected at 162 railway-highway crossings in South Korea between 1998 and 2002. This data set has been shown to exhibit underdispersion when models linking crash data to various explanatory variables are estimated. The modeling results were compared to those produced from the Poisson and gamma probability models documented in a previous published study. The results of this research show that the COM-Poisson GLM can handle crash data when the modeling output shows signs of underdispersion. Finally, they also show that the model proposed in this study provides better statistical performance than the gamma probability and the traditional Poisson models, at least for this data set.