The Confidence Density for Correlation

Inference for correlation is central in statistics. From a Bayesian viewpoint, the final most complete outcome of inference for the correlation is the posterior distribution. An explicit formula for the posterior density for the correlation for the binormal is derived. This posterior is an optimal confidence distribution and corresponds to a standard objective prior. It coincides with the fiducial introduced by R.A. Fisher in 1930 in his first paper on fiducial inference. C.R. Rao derived an explicit elegant formula for this fiducial density, but the new formula using hypergeometric functions is better suited for numerical calculations. Several examples on real data are presented for illustration. A brief review of the connections between confidence distributions and Bayesian and fiducial inference is given in an Appendix.

Generalized fiducial inference on the mean of zero-inflated Poisson and Poisson hurdle models

Zero-inflated and hurdle models are widely applied to count data possessing excess zeros, where they can simultaneously model the process from how the zeros were generated and potentially help mitigate the effects of overdispersion relative to the assumed count distribution. Which model to use depends on how the zeros are generated: zero-inflated models add an additional probability mass on zero, while hurdle models are two-part models comprised of a degenerate distribution for the zeros and a zero-truncated distribution. Developing confidence intervals for such models is challenging since no closed-form function is available to calculate the mean. In this study, generalized fiducial inference is used to construct confidence intervals for the means of zero-inflated Poisson and Poisson hurdle models. The proposed methods are assessed by an intensive simulation study. An illustrative example demonstrates the inference methods.