Talk:Index of dispersion

This seems vague and confused. The word "event" is used in a non-standard way, and there seems to be no reason why this term should not be taken to refer to a parameter rather than a statistic. And why this talk of "intervals"? Michael Hardy (talk) 03:33, 24 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I was hoping to find some articles on point processes to link to, to provide the context. Unfortunately there don't seem to be any immediately relevant other than going to the Poisson distribution article, which I think would be confusing. I will try some minor changes for now. Melcombe (talk) 09:39, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Isn't the binomial distribution only for yes/no type dependent variables, and the count data that the index of dispersion applies to not necessarily of a binary nature? While I really like the simplicity of the sorting of distributions by the relation of variance to mean, I fear that the binomial distribution here should be replaced with a quasi poisson distribution or hurdle model. Really looking for help here... Briancady413 (talk) 21:34, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps the Multinomial distribution should replace the binomial distribution in the VMR table, as it allows for more than two outcomes in the dependent variable. Briancady413 (talk) 21:55, 17 October 2009 (UTC)


 * You appear to be confusing the binomial distribution (having values 0, 1, ..., N) with the binary distribution (having values 0,1). The multinomial distribution is relates to a multivariate outcome/observation, whereas the simple index of dispersion is defined for (multiple outcomes of) a univariate random variable. Melcombe (talk) 08:59, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Dispersion "k" parameter in COVID-19
These days, the media are talking about the "k" parameter for the basic reproduction number R0, for example here. It seems that a value < 1 corresponds to VMR > 1, but there is no definition anywhere. There is a mathematical description in Endo et al, Estimating the overdispersion in COVID-19... (estimating k=0.1 for COVID-19) but my statistics undestanding is not enough to understand what it means. Maybe someone who does could add a paragraph to this article? Han-Kwang (t) 21:20, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

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