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Dengue fever is a tropical disease transmitted mainly by the female Aedes aegypti mosquito that affects millions of people every year. As there is still no safe and effective vaccine, currently the best way to prevent the disease is to control the proliferation of the transmitting mosquito. Since the proliferation and life cycle of the mosquito depend on environmental variables such as temperature and water availability, among others, statistical models are needed to understand the existing relationships between environmental variables and the recorded number of dengue cases and predict the number of cases for some future time interval. This prediction is of paramount importance for the establishment of control policies. In general, dengue-fever datasets contain the number of cases recorded periodically (in days, weeks, months or years). Since many dengue-fever datasets tend to be of the overdispersed, long-tail type, some common models like the Poisson regression model or negative binomial regression model are not adequate to model it. For this reason, in this paper we propose modeling a dengue-fever dataset by using a Poisson-inverse-Gaussian regression model. The main advantage of this model is that it adequately models overdispersed long-tailed data because it has a wider skewness range than the negative binomial distribution. We illustrate the application of this model in a real dataset and compare its performance to that of a negative binomial regression model.

In this paper, we proposed a new long-term lifetime distribution with four parameters inserted in a risk competitive scenario with decreasing, increasing and unimodal hazard rate functions, namely the Weibull-Poisson long-term distribution. This new distribution arises from a scenario of competitive latent risk, in which the lifetime associated to the particular risk is not observable, and where only the minimum lifetime value among all risks is noticed in a long-term context. However, it can also be used in any other situation as long as it fits the data well. The Weibull-Poisson long-term distribution is presented as a particular case for the new exponentialPoisson long-term distribution and Weibull long-term distribution. The properties of the proposed distribution were discussed, including its probability density, survival and hazard functions and explicit algebraic formulas for its order statistics. Assuming censored data, we considered the maximum likelihood approach for parameter estimation. For different parameter settings, sample sizes, and censoring percentages various simulation studies were performed to study the mean square error of the maximum likelihood estimative, and compare the performance of the model proposed with the particular cases. The selection criteria Akaike information criterion, Bayesian information criterion, and likelihood ratio test were used for the model selection. The relevance of the approach was illustrated on two real datasets of where the new model was compared with its particular cases observing its potential and competitiveness.

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