Abstract
Count data are omnipresent in many applied fields, often with overdispersion due to an excess of zeroes or extreme values. With mixtures of Poisson distributions representing an elegant and appealing modelling strategy, we focus here on the challenging problem of identifying a suitable mixing distribution and study how extreme value theory can be used. We propose an original strategy to select the most appropriate candidate among three categories: Fréchet, Gumbel and pseudo-Gumbel. Such an approach is presented with the aid of a decision tree and evaluated with numerical simulations.