A new approach for Weibull modeling for reliability life data analysis

This paper presents a proposed approach for modeling the life data for system components that have failure modes by different Weibull models. This approach is applied for censored, grouped and ungrouped samples. To support the main idea, numerical applications with exact failure times and censored data are implemented. The parameters are obtained by different computational statistical methods such as graphic method based on Weibull probability plot (WPP), maximum likelihood estimates (MLE), Bayes estimators, non-linear Benard's median rank regression. This paper also presents a parametric estimation method depends on expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for estimation the parameters of finite Weibull mixture distributions. GOF is used to determine the best distribution for modeling life data. The performance of the proposed approach to model lifetime data is assessed. It's an efficient approach for moderate and large samples especially with a heavily censored data and few exact failure times. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.