ZIB-EWMA CONTROL CHART FOR MONITORING RARE HEALTH EVENTS

Abstract

Monitoring rare health events, as a significant public health subject, has been considered recently by different authors. In this regard, different statistical methods such as g-type control chart, Poisson CUSUM control chart, sets-based methods, and Bernoulli CUSUM chart have been developed. Zero-inflated binomial (ZIB) distribution, due to its structure, can also be considered to develop methods for monitoring rare health-related events. If zero inflation is considered in the sampling data, and the sampling subgroup size is mandatory greater than 1, then the data best fits the ZIB distribution and the aforementioned control charts cannot be applied. ZIB distribution assumes that random shocks, corresponding to rare health events, occur and then number of failures in each subgroup fits a binomial distribution. In this paper, an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control chart is applied for ZIB data to develop a ZIB-EWMA chart. Since ZIB-EWMA statistic values are not independent, Markov chain approach is considered to evaluate the performance of the proposed control chart in terms of average run length (ARL). According to the ARL measure, this ZIB-EWMA chart has a better performance in comparison with the methods available in the literature. In addition, a real case study related to rare infections in a hospital is investigated to show the applicability of the proposed control chart.