I'm using a data set of an insurance company, and I want to model the number of claims (counts) as a dependent variable (number of insurance claims, nb_sinistre in this data set). In R I use a glm with a Poisson distribution (link = log). Not every observation is observed for the same period. The exposure of a observation is between 0 and 1 (1 = one year).
A sample of the data set "TOBETESTEDR":
nb_sinistre nb NUCAPIDX CDCHINCA CDTAKEOB nb_sinistreAsRate
1 0 0.2465753 294624.0 1 3 0
2 0 0.2465753 20000.0 3 3 0
3 0 0.2739726 245520.0 1 3 0
4 0 0.4684932 297099.8 4 3 0
5 0 0.4684932 63361.5 3 3 0
6 0 0.4794521 216000.0 1 3 0
I put exposure ('nb' in this data set) as an offset in the formula. This is shown here why: When to use an offset in a Poisson regression?
For1 <- as.formula(nb_sinistre ~ NUCAPIDX + CDCHINCA + CDTAKEOB + offset(log(nb)))
Pois1 <- glm(For1, data = TOBETESTEDR, family = poisson(link = "log"))
summary(Pois1)
This returns:
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept) -6.256e+00 1.354e+00 -4.622 3.8e-06 ***
NUCAPIDX 7.132e-07 2.716e-07 2.626 0.00863 **
CDCHINCA 1.453e-01 5.538e-02 2.624 0.00868 **
CDTAKEOB 6.857e-01 4.472e-01 1.533 0.12520
Now I want to know whether I will obtain the same result, but by using the exposure not as an offset, but just change the dependent variable into a ratio itself. Reading this it seems to me it must be possible: How is it possible that Poisson GLM accepts non-integer numbers? So divide the number of claims (count) by the exposure and use this as the dependent variable:
TOBETESTEDR$nb_sinistreAsRate <- TOBETESTEDR$nb_sinistre / TOBETESTEDR$nb
For2 <- as.formula(nb_sinistreAsRate ~ NUCAPIDX + CDCHINCA + CDTAKEOB)
Pois2 <- glm(For2 , data = TOBETESTEDR, family = poisson(link = "log"))
summary(Pois2)
This returns
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept) -7.659e+00 1.176e+00 -6.514 7.31e-11 ***
NUCAPIDX 6.275e-07 1.684e-07 3.726 0.000195 ***
CDCHINCA 2.688e-01 3.373e-02 7.971 1.57e-15 ***
CDTAKEOB 1.130e+00 3.899e-01 2.898 0.003756 **
Which is not exactly the same as the first method. Why are those two not the same?