An Extension of Chen’s Family of Survival Distributions with Bathtub Shape or Increasing Hazard Rate Function

Abstract

In this article we introduce an extension of Chen’s (2000) family of distributions given by Lehman alternatives (see Gupta et al., 1998) that is shown to present another alternative to the generalized Weibull and exponentiated Weibull families for modeling survival data. The extension proposed here can be seen as the extension to the Chen’s distribution as the exponentiated Weibull is to the Weibull. A detailed analysis of the density and hazard shapes is carried out. The new model is also seen to fit well to the flood data used in fitting the exponentiated Weibull model in Mudholkar and Hutson (1996).

Keywords:

• Bathtub shape
• BCa bootstrap confidence interval
• hazard rate function
• Lehman alternative
• lifetime model

Mathematics Subject Classification::

• Primary 62E99
• 60E05
• Secondary 62F99
• 62P30