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Highlights

  • Ordinal outcome

  • Zero inflation: zero observations generated by two distinct processes

  • Robust, cluster–robust, and bootstrap standard errors

  • Complex survey designs support

  • Predict marginal, joint, and conditional probabilities of levels

  • Predict probability of participation and nonparticipation

  • Support for Bayesian estimation

Stata's zioprobit command fits zero-inflated ordered probit (ZIOP) models.

ZIOP models are used for ordered response variables, such as (1) fully ambulatory, (2) ambulatory with restrictions, and (3) partially ambulatory, when the data exhibit a high fraction of observations at the lowest end of the ordering. The concept of zero-inflation has its origin in Poisson models of count data with an overabundance of zeros. zioprobit applies this idea to ordinal data, where numeric value of the lowest category need not be zero. Given the category values we just used, Stata's zioprobit command could fit 1-inflated models. Or we could have numbered the categories 0, 1, and 2, and fit a 0-inflated model. The results would be the same either way.

Standard ordered probit models cannot account for the preponderance of zero observations when the zeros relate to an extra, distinct source. Consider a study of tobacco use in which the outcome of interest, smoking, is an ordered discrete response with four levels coded as 0, 1, 2, and 3, with 0 meaning "Nonsmoker" and 3 meaning "Daily, 20+ cigarettes/day".

Many of the individuals in the first category will be nonsmokers who have never smoked and will never smoke. The rest of them will be ex-smokers. Think of the standard ordered probit model as fitting the behavior of smokers, including ex-smokers. The zero inflation arises because the first group now includes those who have never smoked.

Let's see it work

We have fictional data on the smoking study just described. The outcome variable is called tobacco and contains

tobacco usage Freq. Percent Cum.
Nonsmoker 11,642 78.14 78.14
Weekly or less 532 3.57 81.71
Daily, <20 cigarettes/day 1,933 12.97 94.68
Daily, 20+ cigarettes/day 792 5.32 100.00
Total 14,899 100.00

We believe that the 0 is inflated.

We want to fit a model in which smoking by those who have ever smoked is given by

  • income

  • gender

  • age

And membership in the never-smoked group is determined by

  • income

  • gender

  • age

  • whether parents smoked

  • religion

To fit the model, we type

. zioprobit tobacco income i.female age, inflate(income i.female age i.parent 
     i.religion)

Iteration 0:   log likelihood = -11427.864  
Iteration 1:   log likelihood = -10365.839  (not concave)
Iteration 2:   log likelihood =  -10362.27  
Iteration 3:   log likelihood = -10301.882  
Iteration 4:   log likelihood = -10299.872  
Iteration 5:   log likelihood = -10299.787  
Iteration 6:   log likelihood = -10299.787  

Zero-inflated ordered probit regression                 Number of obs = 14,899
                                                        Wald chi2(3)  = 751.43
Log likelihood = -10299.787                             Prob > chi2   = 0.0000

tobacco Coefficient Std. err. z P>|z| [95% conf. interval]
tobacco
income .1503256 .0057582 26.11 0.000 .1390398 .1616113
female
female -.2726466 .047975 -5.68 0.000 -.3666759 -.1786173
age -.1394573 .011523 -12.10 0.000 -.1620419 -.1168727
inflate
income -.0654874 .0087703 -7.47 0.000 -.082677 -.0482979
female
female -.2166707 .0509783 -4.25 0.000 -.3165863 -.1167552
age .1205886 .0165181 7.30 0.000 .0882136 .1529636
parent
smoking .7219495 .0436831 16.53 0.000 .6363321 .8075669
religion
discourages -.2095319 .0586036 -3.58 0.000 -.3243927 -.094671
_cons -.5335904 .0873953 -6.11 0.000 -.7048821 -.3622987
/cut1 .0683114 .0881964 -.1045504 .2411731
/cut2 .2977055 .0804097 .1401054 .4553055
/cut3 1.402649 .067253 1.270836 1.534463

The standard ordered probit parameters, coefficients and cutpoints, are displayed in the first and last parts of the output, respectively.

The middle part of the output reports the probit coefficients for the inflation.

Coefficients can be difficult to interpret. For instance, what does a parent smoking coefficient of 0.72 mean? It means that, on average in the data, those whose parents are smokers are about 27% less likely to be never-smokers than those whose parents did not use tobacco. We obtained the 27% by using Stata's margins command:

. margins, predict(pnpar) dydx(parent)

Average marginal effects                                Number of obs = 14,899
Model VCE: OIM

Expression: Pr(nonparticipation), predict(pnpar)
dy/dx wrt:  1.parent

Delta-method
dy/dx Std. err. z P>|z| [95% conf. interval]
parent
smoking -.266089 .015175 -17.53 0.000 -.2958314 -.2363467
Note: dy/dx for factor levels is the discrete change from the base level.

The predict(pnpar) option is unique to margins when used after zioprobit or ziologit. We asked margins to calculate predictions of the probability of nonparticipation, which in this example means the probability of being a never-smoker.

Tell me more

You can also fit Bayesian zero-inflated ordered probit models using the bayes prefix.

Read more about zero-inflated ordered probit in the Stata Base Reference Manual.