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Local polynomial estimation of Poisson intensities in the presence of reporting delays
Author(s) -
Chen Feng,
Huggins Richard M.,
Yip Paul S. F.,
Lam K. F.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series c (applied statistics)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.205
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9876
pISSN - 0035-9254
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9876.2008.00624.x
Subject(s) - coroner , poisson distribution , estimation , estimator , polynomial , poisson regression , intensity (physics) , ranking (information retrieval) , parametric statistics , statistics , function (biology) , mathematics , econometrics , computer science , poison control , injury prevention , medicine , environmental health , engineering , mathematical analysis , population , physics , quantum mechanics , machine learning , evolutionary biology , biology , systems engineering
Summary. The system for monitoring suicides in Hong Kong has considerable delays in reporting as the cause of death needs to be determined by a coroner's investigation. However, timely estimates of suicide rates are desirable to assist in the formulation of public health policies. This motivated us to develop a non‐parametric procedure to estimate the intensity function of a Poisson process in the presence of reporting delays. We give closed form estimators of the Poisson intensity and the delay distribution, conduct simulation studies to evaluate the method proposed and derive their asymptotic properties. The method proposed is applied to estimate the intensity of suicide in Hong Kong.