I am new to the SAS community and want to thank you very much for your responses, I really appreciate it and must say I am amazed by how helpful and knowledgeable you are! What I did to model the monthly frequency is use the data to create a "Frequency" column by dividing the number of claims by the exposure months. Please see below: Policyholder Gender Age Months insured Total number of claims Total amount of claims Frequency Peter Male 22 6 1 $10 000 0,16666667 Sue Female 32 12 0 0 0 So, using your formula JacobSimonsen: λ =time * exp(β X) I, in effect, divided both sides by time, to end up with a model for frequency: λ/time =exp(β X)=frequency where λ/time=frequency, and I therefore modelled frequency without the offset term, as below: proc genmod data=mydata; class gender; model frequency = gender age / dist = poisson link = log run; So the effect of months on cover not being equal for all clients is taken account of by working out the frequency beforehand. And therefore the offset term is not necessary since I am modelling λ/time =exp(β X). And this is still a Poisson distribution since if X - poi(λ), then X/t - poi(λ/t) Is my logic correct? Thanks in advance for your help!
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