Two approaches to monitoring multivariate Poisson counts: Simple and accurate

We consider the monitoring of multivariate correlated count data, which have many applications in practice. Although there are quite a few methods for the statistical process control of Multivariate Poisson (MP) counts, they are either too complicated or too simple to provide a satisfactory tool for efficient online monitoring. In addition, they mostly focus on only the mean vector of multivariate counts and ignore the correlations among them. In this article, we adopt the multivariate Poisson distribution with a two-way covariance structure for modeling MP counts, which has marginal Poisson distributions in each dimension and allows for pairwise correlations. Based on this, we develop two control charts to simultaneously monitor the mean vector and covariance matrix of MP counts. The first chart enjoys a simple charting statistic and is computationally fast, whereas the second one is accurate and provides a gold standard for monitoring MP counts. We also give recommendations on choice between them. Numerical simulations have demonstrated the advantages of the proposed two charts, and in non-Poisson cases we also test their robustness against underdispersion and overdispersion that are encountered often in count data.