Statistical Inference from Modified Weibull Distribution

Models with bathtub-shaped failure rate function are useful in reliability analysis and particularly in reliability related decision making and cost analysis. A modified Weibull distribution (MWD) was recently proposed by Lai et al.(2003) as a generalization of the two-parameter Weibull distribution. This distribution has both the two-parameter Weibull and the type I extreme value distributions as special cases. This lifetime distribution is able to model data with bathtub-shaped hazard rate, which is an important feature for engineering reliability analysis. Parameter estimation is crucial for the model to be built and is often a difficult problem, especially for distributions with more than 2 parameters. In this book, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is studied in detail. Several techniques regarding this estimation method are proposed to simplify computation. Another estimation met.