An Additive Chen Distribution with Applications to Lifetime Data

Abstract

This paper presents a lifetime model with properties representing increasing, decreasing, and bathtub curve shapes for failure rates. The proposed model was built based on the additive methodology, for which the Chen distribution was used as the base model, thus introducing the Additive Chen Distribution (AddC). An essential feature of AddC is this model’s excellent flexibility in describing failure rates with non-monotonic behavior or with the shape of a bathtub curve concerning other current models. Statistical properties of AddC are presented and analyzed for different fields of study. For the estimation of AddC’s parameters, the maximum likelihood method (MLE) was used. Three case studies in different fields of application are presented, from which AddC is compared against other probability distributions with similar properties. The results show that AddC offers competitive results.