On analysis of incomplete field failure data
arXiv:1412.1331 · doi:10.1214/14-AOAS752
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.
Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOAS752 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)