Inference on the reliability of inverse Weibull with multiply Type-I censored data

Abstract

Inverse Weibull (IW) distribution is widely used due to its non-monotonic hazard function. For the IW distribution, existing research on statistical inference has mostly focused on censored data, but there has been no study on multiply Type-I censoring until now as far as we know. The multiple Type-I censoring, acted as an extended form of Type-I censoring, is frequently encountered in industry and medicine research, which also needs to be paid attention. Thus, this study conducts detailed analyses on the reliability of IW distribution with multiply Type-I censored data, including point estimation and confidence interval (CI) construction. Four methods, including the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), least square estimation (LSE), and two Bayesian estimations, namely MCMC and Lindley, are adopted in point estimation. Results show that the Lindley method performs best with small mission times, while MLE is optimal for large mission times. Specifically, for the CIs construction, we proposed a pivotal quantity based on LSE to construct the CIs of reliability and compare it with two popular methods, Fisher information matrix (FIM) derivation and MCMC algorithm. Our proposed method shows competitive performance as the MCMC and outperforms FIM. Finally, those estimation methods are applied to an example for illustration.