Burr XII Distribution for Disease Data Analysis in the Presence of a Partially Observed Failure Mode

Abstract

Modeling competing failure modes is an important problem in engineering and survival analyses. Competing failure modes are partially observed in many applications and often pose a modeling challenge. This study discusses the inference for partially observed failure modes assuming a Burr XII distribution. In particular, we consider two failure modes, and the failure time data are collected under a hybrid type I censoring scheme. The model parameters are estimated using maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods under a symmetric squared error loss function, whereas the intervals estimation is done with three methods: asymptotic and credible confidence intervals. Besides a simulation study, a real-life data set is taken from individuals who live in an environment with several diseases to present the utility of the work. Additionally, a simulation study is constructed to measure and compare different estimation methods.

Keywords

• Burr XII distribution
• partially observed failure modes
• hybrid type I censoring scheme
• maximum likelihood
• symmetric squared error