A generalized pH acceleration model of nano-sol products and the effects of model misspecification on shelf-life prediction

Abstract

In existing pH acceleration models, which are used to assess the shelf-life of liquid-phase nano-sol products, a mixture of normal distributions is commonly employed to describe the sizes of particles mixing from two populations. The Gaussian mixture model approach falls short when used to characterize the asymmetric distributions of particle sizes in subgroups. This work considers instead a broader class of a mixture of log-F distributions, to be embedded in a pH acceleration model. This study aims at understanding the impact of the new modeling approach, in the presence of model misspecification of the particle size distribution, on the accuracy and precision for making the shelf-life predictions. This study found that model misspecification indeed significantly affects the shelf-life predictions. The proposed method shows favorable finite sample performance on a simulated data set. Both the quantitative analysis of the impact due to model misspecification and the solution proposed herein could benefit practitioners in the long run.