Compound distributions motivated by linear failure rate

Abstract

Motivated by three failure data sets (lifetime of patients, failure time of hard drives and failure timeof a product), we introduce three different three-parameter distributions, study basic mathematical properties, address estimation by the method of maximum likelihood and investigate finite sample performance of the estimators. We show that one of the new distributions provides a better fit toeach data set than eight other distributions each having three parameters and three distributions each having two parameters.