Some properties of hazard rate functions of systems with two components

In this paper we compare the hazard rate functions of two parallel systems, each of which consists of two independent components with exponential distribution functions. The paper gives various conditions under which there exists a hazard rate ordering between the two parallel systems. It is also shown that some of these conditions are both sufficient and necessary. In particular, it is proven that if the vector consisting of the two hazard rates of the two exponential components in one parallel system weakly supmajorizes the counterpart of the other parallel system, then the first parallel system is greater than the second parallel system in the hazard rate ordering. This paper further compares the hazard rate functions of two parallel systems when both systems have components following a certain bivariate exponential distribution.     

Estimation of conditional quantiles by a new smoothing approximation of asymmetric loss functions

In this paper, nonparametric estimation of conditional quantiles of a nonlinear time series model is formulated as a nonsmooth optimization problem involving an asymmetric loss function. This asymmetric loss function is nonsmooth and is of the same structure as the so-called lopsided absolute value function. Using an effective smoothing approximation method introduced for this lopsided absolute value function, we obtain a sequence of approximate smooth optimization problems. Some important convergence properties of the approximation are established. Each of these smooth approximate optimization problems is solved by an optimization algorithm based on a sequential quadratic programming approximation with active set strategy. Within the framework of locally linear conditional quantiles, the proposed approach is compared with three other approaches, namely, an approach proposed by Yao and Tong (1996), the Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares method and the Interior-Point method, through some empirical numerical studies using simulated data and the classic lynx pelt series. In particular, the empirical performance of the proposed approach is almost identical with that of the Interior-Point method, both methods being slightly better than the Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares method. The Yao-Tong approach is comparable with the other methods in the ideal cases for the Yao-Tong method, but otherwise it is outperformed by other approaches. An important merit of the proposed approach is that it is conceptually simple and can be readily applied to parametrically nonlinear conditional quantile estimation.