A New Extension of Chen Distribution with Applications to Lifetime Data

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new lifetime distribution with increasing, decreasing and bathtub-shaped hazard rate function which is constructed by compounding of the Weibull and Chen distributions and is called Weibull–Chen (W–C) distribution. The new distribution is more flexible to model the bathtub-shaped hazard rate data, and its hazard rate function is simple. We study its statistical properties including quantiles, moments, order statistics and Renyi entropy. The estimation of parameters by maximum likelihood method is discussed, and a Monte Carlo simulation study is conducted to investigate the performance of the maximum likelihood estimators. Finally, it is shown that the proposed distribution fits two real lifetime data better than other distributions.

Keywords

Chen distribution / Weibull distribution / Maximum likelihood estimation / Lifetime data analysis