Introduce a latent Bernoulli distribution indicator , with denoting a structural zero and . Conditional on , retain the negative binomial regression with and . This gives a zero-inflated negative binomial model:
A participant who fishes may still catch zero, so an observed zero does not reveal the latent class. This distinguishes zero inflation from a hurdle model, which truncates the count component at zero. The marginal expectation becomes , and the law of total variance gives
A constant is a parsimonious starting model. If there is evidence that nonparticipation changes with day or other recorded predictors, use logistic regression for instead. Conditional independence of visitors remains an assumption; extra zeros alone do not establish its validity.