A two-stage estimation algorithm for a type of current status data

Abstract

Success-failure life tests are widely used in reliability engineering research to evaluate the storage life of products, where the observed data are the current status data, usually summarized as the form of “binomial life data”. For this type of data, this paper proposes a two-stage algorithm to estimate some commonly used lifetime distributions. This algorithm is automatic, intuitively appealing and simple to implement. Simulation studies show that compared with some existing methods, the proposed algorithm is more stable and efficient, especially in small sample situations, and it can also be extended to deal with some complicated lifetime distributions.