Modeling the Cigarette Consumption of Poor Households Using Penalized Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial Regression with Minimax Concave Penalty

Abstract

The cigarette commodity is the second largest contributor to the food poverty line. Several aspects imply that poor people consume cigarettes despite having a minimal income. In this study, we are interested in investigating factors influencing poor people to be active smokers. Since the consumption number is a set of count data with zero excess, we have an overdispersion problem. This implies that a standard Poisson regression technique cannot be implemented. On the other hand, the factors involved in the model need to be selected simultaneously. Therefore, we propose to use a zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) regression with a minimax concave penalty (MCP) to determine the dominant factors influencing cigarette consumption in poor households. The data used in this study were microdata from the National Socioeconomic Survey (SUSENAS) conducted in March 2019 in East Java Province, Indonesia. The result shows that poor households with a male head of household, having no education, working in the informal sector, having many adult household members, and receiving social assistance tend to consume more cigarettes than others. Additionally, cigarette consumption decreases with the increasing age of the head of household.