초록
As more companies are equipped with data aquisition systems for their products, huge amount of field warranty data has been accumulated. We focus on the case when the field data for a given product comprise with the number of sales and the number of the first failures for each period. The number of censored items and their ages are assumed to be given. This type of data are incomplete in the sense that the age of a failed item is unknown. We construct a model for this type of data and propose an algorithm for nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation of the product reliability. Unlike the nonhomogeneous Poisson process(NHPP) model, our method can handle the data with censored items as well as those with small population. A few examples are investigated to characterize our model, and a real field warranty data set is analyzed by the method.
