In statistics, a tobit model is any of a class of regression models in which the observed range of the dependent variable is censored in some way. The term was coined by Arthur Goldberger in reference to James Tobin, who developed the model in 1958 to mitigate the problem of zero-inflated data for observations of household expenditure on durable goods. Because Tobin's method can be easily extended to handle truncated and other non-randomly selected samples, some authors adopt a broader definition of the tobit model that includes these cases.