BURR CRITICAL VALUE APPROXIMATIONS FOR TESTS OF AUTOCORRELATION AND HETEROSCEDASTICITY

The paper evaluates the accuracy of Burr approximations of critical values and p-values for test a of autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity in the linear regression model.     

A Multivariate Model for Repeated Failure Time Measurements

A parametric multivariate failure time distribution is derived from a frailty-type model with a particular frailty distribution. It covers as special cases certain distributions which have been used for multivariate survival data in recent years. Some properties of the distribution are derived: its marginal and conditional distributions lie within the parametric family, and association between the component variates can be positive or, to a limited extent, negative. The simple closed form of the survivor function is useful for right-censored data, as occur commonly in survival analysis, and for calculating uniform residuals. Also featured is the distribution of ratios of paired failure times. The model is applied to data from the literature     

Optimal B-robust estimators for the parameters of the Burr XII distribution

The Burr XII distribution offers a flexible alternative to the distributions that play important role for modelling data in reliability, risk and process capability. However, estimating the shape parameters of the Burr XII distribution is a challenging problem. The classical estimation methods such as maximum likelihood and least squares are often used to estimate the parameters of the Burr XII distribution, but these methods are very sensitive to the outliers in the data. Thus, a robust estimation method alternative to the classical methods is needed to find robust estimators that are less sensitive to the outliers in the data. The purpose of this paper is to use the optimal B-robust estimation method [Hampel FR, Ronchetti EM, Rousseeuw PJ, Stahel WA. Robust statistics: the approach based on influence functions. New York: Wiley; 1986] to obtain robust estimators for the shape parameters of the Burr XII distribution. The simulation results show that the optimal B-robust estimators generally outperform the classical estimators in terms of the bias and root mean square errors when there are outliers in data.     

Likelihood estimation for a general class of inverse exponentiated distributions based on complete and progressively censored data

In this paper, we establish the existence and uniqueness of the maximum-likelihood estimates of the parameters of a general class of inverse exponentiated distributions based on complete as well as progressively Type-I and Type-II censored data.     

On tail behaviour of kth upper order statistics under fixed and random sample sizes via tail equivalence

For a fixed positive integer k, limit laws of linearly normalized kth upper order statistics are well known. In this article, a comprehensive study of tail behaviours of limit laws of normalized kth upper order statistics under fixed and random sample sizes is carried out using tail equivalence which leads to some interesting tail behaviours of the limit laws. These lead to definitive answers about their max domains of attraction. Stochastic ordering properties of the limit laws are also studied. The results obtained are not dependent on linear norming and apply to power norming as well and generalize some results already available in the literature. And the proofs given here are elementary.     

Bayesian prediction for progressively censored data from the Burr model

Received: August 14, 2000; revised version: April 23, 2001     

An Extension of Economic Design of x-Bar Control Charts for Non Normally Distributed Data Under Weibull Shock Models

Three parameters—sample size, sampling intervals, and the control limits—must be determined when the x bar chart to monitor a manufacturing process. The constant sampling intervals were widely employed because of its administrative simplicity. However, the variable sampling interval (VSI) has recently been shown to give substantially faster detection of most process shifts than fixed-sampling-interval (FSI) for x-bar charts. In addition, these measurements in the subgroup are assumed to be normally distributed. That assumption may not be tenable. This investigation compares the economic design of x-bar control charts for non normal data under Weibull shock models with various sampling avenues.     

Fisher Information Matrix for the Generalized Feller-Pareto Distribution

In this article, the exact form of Fisher information matrix for the generalized Feller-Pareto (GFP) distribution is determined. The GFP family is a general distribution which includes a variety of distributions as special cases. For example:

??generalized Singh-Maddala distribution which in turn includes Burr, Fisk, and Lomax distribution (see Kleiber and Kotz, 2003 Kleiber, C., Kotz, S. (2003). Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]);

??a Pareto IV distribution which includes a hierarchy of Pareto models, omitted an additional location parameter (see Arnold, 1983 Arnold, B.C. (1983). Pareto Distributions. Fairland, MD: International Cooperative Publishing House. [Google Scholar], 2008 Arnold, B.C. (2008). Pareto and generalized pareto distributions. In: Modeling Income Distributions and Lorenz Curves, Economic Studies in Equality, Social Exclusion and Well-Being, Chotikapanich, D. (Ed.), New York: Springer. pp. 119–145.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); and

??beta Lomax distribution which includes, for example, beta II and Lomax distributions.

Application of these distributions covers a wide spectrum of areas ranging from actuarial science, economics, finance to bioscience, telecommunications, and medicine.     

On the existence and uniqueness of the MLEs of the parameters of a general class of exponentiated distributions

In this paper, we present a formal simple proof for the existence and uniqueness of the maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) of the parameters of a general class of exponentiated distributions. This class includes the exponentiated (general) exponential, exponentiated Rayleigh (scaled Burr X) and exponentiated Pareto distributions, as special cases, and thus the proof given here establishes the existence and uniqueness of the MLEs for these important special cases as well.     

Robust regression for estimating the Burr XII parameters with outliers

The Burr XII distribution offers a more flexible alternative to the lognormal, log-logistic and Weibull distributions. Outliers can occur during reliability life testing. Thus, we need an efficient method to estimate the parameters of the Burr XII distribution for censored data with outliers. The objective of this paper is to present a robust regression (RR) method called M-estimator to estimate the parameters of a two-parameter Burr XII distribution based on the probability plotting procedure for both the complete and multiply-censored data with outliers. The simulation results show that the RR method outperforms the unweighted least squares and maximum likelihood methods in most cases in terms of bias and errors in the root mean square.