Abstract
Many real-life count data are frequently characterized by overdispersion, excess zeros and autocorrelation. Zero-inflated count time series models can provide a powerful procedure to model this type of data. In this paper, we introduce a new stationary first-order integer-valued autoregressive process with random coefficient and zero-inflated geometric marginal distribution, named ZIGINAR(RC)(1) process, which contains some sub-models as special cases. Several properties of the process are established. Estimators of the model parameters are obtained and their performance is checked by a small Monte Carlo simulation. Also, the behavior of the inflation parameter of the model is justified. We investigate an application of the process using a real count climate data set with excessive zeros for the number of tornados deaths and illustrate the best performance of the proposed process as compared with a set of competitive INAR(1) models via some goodness-of-fit statistics. Consequently, forecasting for the data is discussed with estimation of the transition probability and expected run length at state zero. Moreover, for the considered data, a test of the random coefficient for the proposed process is investigated.