Characterization of Life Distributions Using Log-odds Rate in Discrete Aging

Abstract

For studying and modeling the time to failure of a system or component, many reliability practitioners used the hazard rate and its monotone behaviors. However, nowadays, there are two problems. First, the modern components have high reliability and, second, their distributions are usually have non monotone hazard rate, such as, the truncated normal, Burr XII, and inverse Gaussian distributions. So, modeling these data based on the hazard rate models seems to be too stringent. Zimmer et al. (1998) and Wang et al. (2003, 2008) introduced and studied a new time to failure model in continuous distributions based on log-odds rate (LOR) which is comparable to the model based on the hazard rate.

There are many components and devices in industry, that have discrete distributions with non monotone hazard rate, so, in this article, we introduce the discrete log-odds rate which is different from its analog in continuous case. Also, an alternative discrete reversed hazard rate which we called it the second reversed rate of failure in discrete times is also defined here. It is shown that the failure time distributions can be characterized by the discrete LOR. Moreover, we show that the discrete logistic and log logistics distributions have property of a constant discrete LOR with respect to t and ln t, respectively. Furthermore, properties of some distributions with monotone discrete LOR, such as the discrete Burr XII, discrete Weibull, and discrete truncated normal are obtained.

Keywords:

• Discrete log-odds rate
• Hazard rate
• Reversed hazard rate
• Second hazard rate
• Second reversed rate of failure

Mathematics Subject Classification:

• 62E10
• 62N05

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Associate Editor and learned referees for their valuable comments which improved the article. This research was supported by a grant from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (No. MS89201REZ).