How to obtain Poisson's distribution "lambda" from R glm() coefficients - r

Question

My R-script produces glm() coeffs below.
What is Poisson's lambda, then? It should be ~3.0 since that's what I used to create the distribution.
Call:
glm(formula = h_counts ~ ., family = poisson(link = log), data = pois_ideal_data)
Deviance Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-22.726 -12.726 -8.624 6.405 18.515
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept) 8.222532 0.015100 544.53 <2e-16 ***
h_mids -0.363560 0.004393 -82.75 <2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
(Dispersion parameter for poisson family taken to be 1)
Null deviance: 11451.0 on 10 degrees of freedom
Residual deviance: 1975.5 on 9 degrees of freedom
AIC: 2059
Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 5
random_pois = rpois(10000,3)
h=hist(random_pois, breaks = 10)
mean(random_pois) #verifying that the mean is close to 3.
h_mids = h$mids
h_counts = h$counts
pois_ideal_data <- data.frame(h_mids, h_counts)
pois_ideal_model <- glm(h_counts ~ ., pois_ideal_data, family=poisson(link=log))
summary_ideal=summary(pois_ideal_model)
summary_ideal

Answer 1

What are you doing here???!!! You used a glm to fit a distribution???
Well, it is not impossible to do so, but it is done via this:
set.seed(0)
x <- rpois(10000,3)
fit <- glm(x ~ 1, family = poisson())
i.e., we fit data with an intercept-only regression model.
fit$fitted[1]
# 3.005
This is the same as:
mean(x)
# 3.005

Answer 2

It looks like you're trying to do a Poisson fit to aggregated or binned data; that's not what glm does. I took a quick look for canned ways of fitting distributions to canned data but couldn't find one; it looks like earlier versions of the bda package might have offered this, but not now.
At root, what you need to do is set up a negative log-likelihood function that computes (# counts)*prob(count|lambda) and minimize it using optim(); the solution given below using the bbmle package is a little more complex up-front but gives you added benefits like easily computing confidence intervals etc..
Set up data:
set.seed(101)
random_pois <- rpois(10000,3)
tt <- table(random_pois)
dd <- data.frame(counts=unname(c(tt)),
val=as.numeric(names(tt)))
Here I'm using table rather than hist because histograms on discrete data are fussy (having integer cutpoints often makes things confusing because you have to be careful about right- vs left-closure)
Set up density function for binned Poisson data (to work with bbmle's formula interface, the first argument must be called x, and it must have a log argument).
dpoisbin <- function(x,val,lambda,log=FALSE) {
probs <- dpois(val,lambda,log=TRUE)
r <- sum(x*probs)
if (log) r else exp(r)
}
Fit lambda (log link helps prevent numerical problems/warnings from negative lambda values):
library(bbmle)
m1 <- mle2(counts~dpoisbin(val,exp(loglambda)),
data=dd,
start=list(loglambda=0))
all.equal(unname(exp(coef(m1))),mean(random_pois),tol=1e-6) ## TRUE
exp(confint(m1))
## 2.5 % 97.5 %
## 2.972047 3.040009