A Poisson distribution is commonly used as the innovation distribution for integer-valued autoregressive models, but its mean is equal to its variance, which limits flexibility, so a flexible, one-parameter, infinitely divisible Bell distribution may be a good alternative. In addition, for a parameter with a small value, the Bell distribution approaches the Poisson distribution. In this paper, we introduce a new first-order, non-negative, integer-valued autoregressive model with Bell innovations based on the binomial thinning operator. Compared with other models, the new model is not only simple but also particularly suitable for time series of counts exhibiting overdispersion. Some properties of the model are established here, such as the mean, variance, joint distribution functions, and multi-step-ahead conditional measures. Conditional least squares, Yule-Walker, and conditional maximum likelihood are used for estimating the parameters. Some simulation results are presented to access these estimates' performances. Real data examples are provided.
Keywords: Bell distribution; INAR; count time series; estimation; overdispersion.