In case more of you come across my request from this morning, I've already gotten several great tips, which I summarize here since one or two of these did not come across R-help as well. A team of fellow political scientists is on this problem like "white-on-rice"! Brandt, Patrick, John T. Williams Benjamin O. Fordham, and Brian Pollins. 2000. "Dynamic Modeling for Persistent Event Count Time Series" American Journal of Political Science. 44(4): 823-843. Brandt, Patrick and John T. Williams. 2001. "A Linear Poisson Autoregressive Model: The Poisson AR(p)" Political Analysis. 9(2): 164-184. There is software for implementing these models in GAUSS on Patrick Brandt's webpage, http://www.psci.unt.edu/~brandt/pests/pests.htm. He said he is working out R versions as well! Jake Bowers pointed me to Jim Lindsey's packages for Nonlinear Regression and Repeated Measurements which has some functions which appear very promising: http://alpha.luc.ac.be/~lucp0753/rcode.html Thomas Lumley pointed out that instead of NB, one can get a Poisson-Normal mixture out of this by changing the assumption on the error term. He pointed me at some articles that are exactly on point - Zeger (Biometrika 1988, pp621-629) gives an estimation procedure for a time series count model that is based on a Poisson-Normal mixture. - Something more or less similar is discussed by Davis et al (Biometrika 2000, p491-505) And he to consider "sandwich estimators" (or similar) for longitudinal data. He wrote "Some of these (eg the Newey-West estimator) have been used in econometrics for a long time. Although they are most often used for continuous response variables they work perfectly well for counts. Stata 7.0 does the Newey-West estimator for generalised linear models, which may be what you had heard about. These and related sandwich-type estimators are reviewed by Lumley & Heagerty (JRSSB 1999,pp459-477). I have R code, but again only for generalised linear models, not for zero-inflation models." Thomas added: - The Poisson-Normal model leads to a loglinear marginal model that can be fitted by glm(), and I would expect something similar to be true of the zero-inflation model. This means that you may be able to just estimate a marginal model (unless you are actually interested in inference about the correlation structure). In principle this could be inefficient, but for very discrete data there isn't much information in the autocorrelation. - The full likelihood is intractable anyway -- it doesn't factorise the way a Gaussian AR-1 does. That's one reason Bayesians like these models: MCMC is the easy way out computationally (though still not trivial). There's a fairly popular approximate maximum likelihood method called PQL that works reasonably well except in binary and small count data. I've also learned that I should look up these articles: McKenzie, E. 1988. Some ARMA models for dependent sequences of Poisson counts. Advanced Applied Probability. 20: 822-835 Bockenholt, U. 1999. Mixed INAR(1) Poisson regression models. J. of Econometrics, 89: 317-338. -- Paul E. Johnson email: pauljohn at ukans.edu Dept. of Political Science http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn University of Kansas Office: (785) 864-9086 Lawrence, Kansas 66045 FAX: (785) 864-5700 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._