A Simple Normal Approximation for Weibull Distribution with Application to Estimation of Upper Prediction Limit.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Probability and Statistics Volume 2011, Article ID 863274, 10 pages doi:10.1155/2011/863274 Research Article A Simple Normal Approximation for Weibull Distribution with Application to Estimation of Upper Prediction Limit H. V. Kulkarni and S. K. Powar Department of Statistics, Shivaji University, Kolhapur 416 004, India Correspondence should be addressed to H. V. Kulkarni, kulkarnih1@rediff Received 30 May 2011; Accepted 24 September 2011 Academic Editor: A. Thavaneswaran Copyright q 2011 H. V. Kulkarni and S. K. Powar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We propose a simple close-to-normal approximation to a Weibull random variable r.v. and consider the problem of estimation of upper prediction limit UPL that includes at least l out of m future observations from a Weibull distribution at each of r locations, based on the proposed approximation and the well-known Box-Cox normal approximation. A comparative study based on Monte Carlo simulations revealed that the normal approximation-based UPLs for Weibull distribution outperform those based on the existing generalized variable GV approach. The normal approximation-based UPLs have markedly larger coverage probabilities than GV approach, particularly for small unknown shape parameter where the distribution is highly skewed, and for small sample sizes which are commonly encountered in industrial applications. Results are illustrated with a real dataset for practitioners. 1. Introduction Weibull distribution is widely used i