Tweedie distributions for fitting semicontinuous health care utilization cost data

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of Tweedie distributions to model semicontinuous health care costs, effectively capturing both zero utilization and positive costs, and compares its performance to other models.

Contribution

It introduces Tweedie distributions as a flexible approach for modeling semicontinuous health care cost data, demonstrating its advantages over traditional models.

Findings

Tweedie distribution fits health care cost data well.

It effectively models zero-inflated and continuous costs.

Offers flexible properties for health economics analysis.

Abstract

We explore a statistical distribution that can simultaneously model the probability of zero outcome for non-users of health care utilization and continuous costs for users. We compare this distribution to other com- monly used models on example data and show that it fits cost data well and has some appealing properties that provide flexible use.