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Celis, P., de la Cruz, R., Fuentes, C., & Gomez, H. W. (2021). Survival and Reliability Analysis with an Epsilon-Positive Family of Distributions with Applications. Symmetry, 13(5), 908.
Abstract: We introduce a new class of distributions called the epsilon-positive family, which can be viewed as generalization of the distributions with positive support. The construction of the epsilon-positive family is motivated by the ideas behind the generation of skew distributions using symmetric kernels. This new class of distributions has as special cases the exponential, Weibull, log-normal, log-logistic and gamma distributions, and it provides an alternative for analyzing reliability and survival data. An interesting feature of the epsilon-positive family is that it can viewed as a finite scale mixture of positive distributions, facilitating the derivation and implementation of EM-type algorithms to obtain maximum likelihood estimates (MLE) with (un)censored data. We illustrate the flexibility of this family to analyze censored and uncensored data using two real examples. One of them was previously discussed in the literature; the second one consists of a new application to model recidivism data of a group of inmates released from the Chilean prisons during 2007. The results show that this new family of distributions has a better performance fitting the data than some common alternatives such as the exponential distribution.
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Leao, J., Leiva, V., Saulo, H., & Tomazella, V. (2017). Birnbaum-Saunders frailty regression models: Diagnostics and application to medical data. Biom. J., 59(2), 291–314.
Abstract: In survival models, some covariates affecting the lifetime could not be observed or measured. These covariates may correspond to environmental or genetic factors and be considered as a random effect related to a frailty of the individuals explaining their survival times. We propose a methodology based on a Birnbaum-Saunders frailty regression model, which can be applied to censored or uncensored data. Maximum-likelihood methods are used to estimate the model parameters and to derive local influence techniques. Diagnostic tools are important in regression to detect anomalies, as departures from error assumptions and presence of outliers and influential cases. Normal curvatures for local influence under different perturbations are computed and two types of residuals are introduced. Two examples with uncensored and censored real-world data illustrate the proposed methodology. Comparison with classical frailty models is carried out in these examples, which shows the superiority of the proposed model.
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