Abstract
When applying analysis of variance, the sample sizes may not be previously known, so it is more appropriate to consider them as realizations of random variables. A motivating example is the collection of observations during a fixed time span in a study comparing, for example, several pathologies of patients arriving at a hospital. This paper extends the theory of analysis of variance to those situations considering mixed effects models. We will assume that the occurrences of observations correspond to a counting process and the sample dimensions have Poisson distribution. The proposed approach is applied to a study of cancer patients.