A consistent method of estimation for the three-parameter Weibull distribution

In this paper, we propose a new method for the estimation of parameters of the three-parameter Weibull distribution. The method is based on a data transformation, which avoids the problem of unbounded likelihood. In the proposed method, under mild conditions, the estimates always exist uniquely in the entire parameter space, and the estimators also have consistency over the entire parameter space. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we further show that the proposed method performs better than some existing methods in terms of bias and root mean squared error (RMSE). Finally, two examples based on real data sets are presented to illustrate the proposed method. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.