On analysis of incomplete field failure data
Zhisheng Ye, Hon Keung Tony Ng
The Annals of Applied Statistics · 2014 · Volume 8 · Issue 3
Abstract
Many commercial products are sold with warranties and indirectly through dealers. The manufacturer-retailer distribution mechanism results in serious missing data problems in field return data, as the sales date for an unreturned unit is generally unknown to the manufacturer. This study considers a general setting for field failure data with unknown sales dates and a warranty limit. A stochastic expectation–maximization (SEM) algorithm is developed to estimate the distributions of the sales lag (time between shipment to a retailer and sale to a customer) and the lifetime of the product under study. Extensive simulations are used to evaluate the performance of the SEM algorithm and to compare with the imputation method proposed by Ghosh [Ann. Appl. Stat. 4 (2010) 1976–1999]. Three real examples illustrate the methodology proposed in this paper.
Keywords
EM algorithm, lifetime data, maximum likelihood estimator, missing information
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