 The discrete additive Weibull distribution: A bathtub-shaped hazard for discontinuous failure dataMark Bebbington, Chin-Diew Lai, Morgan Wellington and RiÄ ardas Zitikis Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2012, vol. 106, issue C, 37-44 Abstract: Although failure data are usually treated as being continuous, they may have been collected in a discrete manner, or in fact be discrete in nature. Reliability models with bathtub-shaped hazard rate are fundamental to the concepts of burn-in and maintenance, but how well do they incorporate discrete data? We explore discrete versions of the additive Weibull distribution, which has the twin virtues of mathematical tractability and the ability to produce bathtub-shaped hazard rate functions. We derive conditions on the parameters for the hazard rate function to be increasing, decreasing, or bathtub shaped. While discrete versions may have the same shaped hazard rate for the same parameter values, we find that when fitted to data the fitted hazard rate shapes can vary between versions. Our results are illustrated using several real-life data sets, and the implications of using continuous models for discrete data discussed. Keywords: Discrete data; Hazard rate; Competing risks; Bathtub distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:106:y:2012:i:c:p:37-44 DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2012.06.009 Access Statistics for this article Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier |
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