The Weibull distribution is a popular and widely used distribution in reliability and in lifetime data analysis. Since 1958, the Weibull distribution has been modified by many researchers to allow for non-monotonic hazard functions. Many modifications of the Weibull distribution have achieved the above purpose. On the other hand, the number of parameters has increased, the forms of the survival and hazard functions have become more complicated and the estimation problems have risen. This thesis provides an extensive review of some discrete and continuous versions of the modifications of the Weibull distribution, which could serve as an important reference and encourage further modifications of the Weibull distribution. Four different modifications of the Weibull distribution are proposed to address some of the above problems using different techniques. First model, with five parameters, is constructed by considering a two-component serial system with one component following a Weibull distribution and another following a modified Weibull distribution. A new method has been proposed to reduce the number of parameters of the new modified Weibull distribution from five to three parameters to simplify the distribution and address the estimation problems. The reduced version has the same desirable properties of the original distribution in spite of having two less parameters. It can be an alternative distribution for all modifications of the Weibull distribution with bathtub shaped hazard rate functions. To deal with unimodal shaped hazard rates, the third model with four parameters, named as the exponentiated reduced modified Weibull distribution is introduced. This model is flexible, has a nice physical interpretation and has the ability to capture monotonically increasing, unimodal and bathtub shaped hazard rates. It is a generalization of the reduced modified Weibull distribution. The proposed distribution gives the best fit comparing to other modifications of the Weibull distribution including those having similar properties. A three-parameter discrete distribution is introduced based on the reduced distribution. It is one of only three discrete distributions allowing for bathtub shaped hazard rate functions. Four real data sets have applied to this distribution. The new distribution is shown to outperform at least three other models including the ones allowing for bathtub shaped hazard rate functions. The new models show flexibility and can be used to model different kinds of real data sets better than other modified versions of Weibull distribution including those having the same number of parameters. The mathematical properties and statistical inferences of the new models are studied. Based on a simulation study the performances of the MLEs of each model are assessed with respect to sample size n. We find no evidence that the generalized modified Weibull distribution can provide a better fit than the exponentiated Weibull distributionfor data sets exhibiting the modified unimodal hazard function.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:618070 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Al-Malki, Saad Jamaan |
| Contributors | Yuan, Jingsong; Nadarajah, Saraleesan |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/statistical-analysis-of-lifetime-data-using-new-modified-weibull-distributions(0c8f3735-cc11-4189-b48e-99514c6110a2).html |
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