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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

A simulation comparison of parametric and nonparametric estimators of quantiles from right censored data

Serasinghe, Shyamalee Kumary January 1900 (has links)
Master of Science / Department of Statistics / Paul I. Nelson / Quantiles are useful in describing distributions of component lifetimes. Data, consisting of the lifetimes of sample units, used to estimate quantiles are often censored. Right censoring, the setting investigated here, occurs, for example, when some test units may still be functioning when the experiment is terminated. This study investigated and compared the performance of parametric and nonparametric estimators of quantiles from right censored data generated from Weibull and Lognormal distributions, models which are commonly used in analyzing lifetime data. Parametric quantile estimators based on these assumed models were compared via simulation to each other and to quantile estimators obtained from the nonparametric Kaplan- Meier Estimator of the survival function. Various combinations of quantiles, censoring proportion, sample size, and distributions were considered. Our simulation show that the larger the sample size and the lower the censoring rate the better the performance of the estimates of the 5th percentile of Weibull data. The lognormal data are very sensitive to the censoring rate and we observed that for higher censoring rates the incorrect parametric estimates perform the best. If you do not know the underlying distribution of the data, it is risky to use parametric estimates of quantiles close to one. A limitation in using the nonparametric estimator of large quantiles is their instability when the censoring rate is high and the largest observations are censored. Key Words: Quantiles, Right Censoring, Kaplan-Meier estimator

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