Age-smooth properties of mixture models

✍ Scribed by Jie Mi

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 110 KB
• Volume: 43
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-7152
• DOI: 10.1016/s0167-7152(98)00262-4

✦ Synopsis

The tail behavior or age-smoothness of a lifetime distribution is an important property from both the theoretical and practical points of view. There are several ways of describing tail behavior. One is to use the failure rate, another uses the mean residual life, and a third uses the conditional survival probability. This article discusses whether a mixture of distribution functions re ects the age-smoothness property of the components making up the mixture for each of the above three type descriptors of tail behavior. Using the criteria of tail behavior, the article further deÿnes strong and weak subpopulations, and shows that the strong subpopulation tail behavior will asymptotically dominate the mixture population and hence the reliability quality of mixture population can be improved by applying burn-in.