ESTIMATION OF PARAMETERS FOR THE LIFETIME DISTRIBUTIONS

This paper deals with various methods of estimation used for estimating the parameters of lifetime distributions. The distributions considered are exponential, Weibull, Rayleigh, lognormal and gamma and the method used are: method of moments, maximum likelihood, probability weighted moments, least squares and relative least squares. To compare the efficiency between the different methods of estimation, we used the total deviation, mean squared error and probability plot correlation coefficients. In order to study numerically, the execution of the different methods of estimation and goodness of fit analysis, their statistical properties have been simulated for different sample sizes. The graphs of bias designed for different methods of estimation have also been plotted against various sample sizes.