Detecting trend change in hazard functions—an L-statistic approach

Abstract

A unified test is proposed to detect trend change in hazard functions. Test statistics based on a weighted integral approach are constructed utilizing a measure of deviation from exponentiality. We exploit L-statistic theory to obtain the exact and asymptotic distributions of our statistics and establish the consistency of the test. Theoretical results of previous works are obtained as special cases. A simulation study shows significant improvement in power depending on appropriate choice of parameters j and k introduced in our work. Finally, applications to real life data sets are presented to illustrate our results.