ESTIMATION OF PARAMETERS OF MIXED EXPONENTIALLY DISTRIBUTED FAILURE TIME DISTRIBUTIONS FROM CENSORED LIFE TEST DATA

Abstract

SUMMARY Statistical methods in life testing analysis have been developed in the past primarily for the case of a single failure population. In this paper a failure population which can be divided into subpopulations, each representing a different type or cause of failure, is considered. Estimates of the population parameters are obtained in the case where the subpopulations are exponentially distributed and sampling is censored at a predetermined test termination time.