A New Modified Exponent Power Alpha Family of Distributions with Applications in Reliability Engineering

Abstract

Probability distributions perform a very significant role in the field of applied sciences, particularly in the field of reliability engineering. Engineering data sets are either negatively or positively skewed and/or symmetrical. Therefore, a flexible distribution is required that can handle such data sets. In this paper, we propose a new family of lifetime distributions to model the aforementioned data sets. This proposed family is known as a “New Modified Exponent Power Alpha Family of distributions” or in short NMEPA. The proposed family is obtained by applying the well-known T-X approach together with the exponential distribution. A three-parameter-specific sub-model of the proposed method termed a “new Modified Exponent Power Alpha Weibull distribution” (NMEPA-Wei for short), is discussed in detail. The various mathematical properties including hazard rate function, ordinary moments, moment generating function, and order statistics are also discussed. In addition, we adopted the method of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for estimating the unknown model parameters. A brief Monte Carlo simulation study is conducted to evaluate the performance of the MLE based on bias and mean square errors. A comprehensive study is also provided to assess the proposed family of distributions by analyzing two real-life data sets from reliability engineering. The analytical goodness of fit measures of the proposed distribution are compared with well-known distributions including (i) APT-Wei (alpha power transformed Weibull), (ii) Ex-Wei (exponentiated-Weibull), (iii) classical two-parameter Weibull, (iv) Mod-Wei (modified Weibull), and (v) Kumar-Wei (Kumaraswamy–Weibull) distributions. The proposed class of distributions is expected to produce many more new distributions for fitting monotonic and non-monotonic data in the field of reliability analysis and survival analysis.