THE LINDLEY NEGATIVE-BINOMIAL DISTRIBUTION: PROPERTIES, ESTIMATION AND APPLICATIONS TO LIFETIME DATA

A generalization of the Lindley distribution namely, Lindley negative-binomial distribution, is introduced. The Lindley and the exponentiated Lindley distributions are considered as sub-models of the proposed distribution. The proposed model has flexible density and hazard rate functions. The density function can be decreasing, right-skewed, left-skewed and approximately symmetric. The hazard rate function possesses various shapes including increasing, decreasing and bathtub. Furthermore, the survival and hazard rate functions have closed form representations which make this model tractable for censored data analysis. Some general properties of the proposed model are studied such as ordinary and incomplete moments, moment generating function, mean deviations, Lorenz and Bonferroni curve. The maximum likelihood and the Bayesian estimation methods are utilized to estimate the model parameters. In addition, a small simulation study is conducted in order to evaluate the performance of the estimation methods. Two real data sets are used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed model. (C) 2020 Mathematical Institute Slovak Academy of Sciences