ArticleBMC medical research methodology2017
Tweedie distributions for fitting semicontinuous health care utilization cost data.
Article in BMC medical research methodology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Randomized Laboratory Study of Single-Dose Cannabis, Dronabinol, and Placebo in Patients With Schizophrenia and Cannabis Use Disorder.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2025Trial
- Comparative evaluation of machine learning strategies for short-term dengue forecasting in Brazilian capital municipalities.International journal of biometeorology · 2026Article
- Universal free school meals and Medicaid spending: evidence from linked education and claims data in Arkansas.Health affairs scholar · 2026Article
- Direct and indirect costs associated with declining distance visual acuity: A nationwide longitudinal cost-of-illness study with 11-year follow-up.Acta ophthalmologica · 2026Observational
- Development and validation of a proposed rule for estimating central venous pressure from inferior vena cava dynamics: a clinical prediction model study.Journal of anesthesia, analgesia and critical care · 2026Article
- Circulating T-follicular helper and type I regulatory T cells have overlapping phenotypes inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Influence of Both La Nina and Island Isolation During COVID-19 on the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases in New Caledonia.Epidemiologia (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Modifying effect of hospital size on the impact of antimicrobial stewardship programs for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infections: a nationwide claims database analysis.Journal of pharmaceutical health care and sciences · 2026Article
- The effect of deductibles on healthcare expenditure: new evidence for Switzerland.BMC health services research · 2026Article
- Unveiling economic and humanistic burden of hematologic malignancies in Japan with personal health record data.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Clinical and economic impact of recurrence in unresected non-small cell lung cancer treated with primary stereotactic body radiotherapy: A real-world study using SEER-Medicare data.Journal of managed care & specialty pharmacy · 2025Article
- Healthcare and productivity costs among Canadian road trauma survivors over the year following injury.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Marginalized two part model for analyzing multilevel semicontinuous medical costs in Iranian households.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Resource use and in-hospital costs after aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage in the Netherlands.Brain & spine · 2025Article
- Disparities in healthcare costs of people experiencing homelessness in Toronto, Canada in the post COVID-19 pandemic era: a matched cohort study.BMC health services research · 2024Article
- Examining Demand and Substitutability of Usual Brand Little Cigars/Cigarillos and Cigarettes in Young Adults Who Dual Use.Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco · 2024Article
- Association between area-level walkability and glycated haemoglobin: a Portuguese population-based study.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Geographically weighted regression analysis for nonnegative continuous outcomes: An application to Taiwan dengue data.PloS one · 2024Article
- Better performance for right-skewed data using an alternative gamma model.BMC medical research methodology · 2023Article
- Analysis of factors associated with the use of Korean medicine after spinal surgery using a nationwide database in Korea.Scientific reports · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe statistical analysis of health care cost data is often problematic because these data are usually non-negative, right-skewed and have excess zeros for non-users. This prevents the use of linear models based on the Gaussian or Gamma distribution. A common way to counter this is the use of Two-part or Tobit models, which makes interpretation of the results more difficult. In this study, I explore a statistical distribution from the Tweedie family of distributions that can simultaneously model the probability of zero outcome, i.e. of being a non-user of health care utilization and continuous costs for users.
methodsI assess the usefulness of the Tweedie model in a Monte Carlo simulation study that addresses two common situations of low and high correlation of the users and the non-users of health care utilization. Furthermore, I compare the Tweedie model with several other models using a real data set from the RAND health insurance experiment.
resultsI show that the Tweedie distribution fits cost data very well and provides better fit, especially when the number of non-users is low and the correlation between users and non-users is high.
conclusionThe Tweedie distribution provides an interesting solution to many statistical problems in health economic analyses.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.