The Logistic–Exponential Survival Distribution

For various parameter combinations, the logistic–exponential survival distribution belongs to four common classes of survival distributions: increasing failure rate, decreasing failure rate, bathtub-shaped failure rate, and upside-down bathtub-shaped failure rate. Graphical comparison of this new distribution with other common survival distributions is seen in a plot of the skewness versus the coefficient of variation. The distribution can be used as a survival model or as a device to determine the distribution class from which a particular data set is drawn. As the three-parameter version is less mathematically tractable, our major results concern the two-parameter version. Boundaries for the maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters are derived in this article. Also, a fixed-point method to find the maximum likelihood estimators for complete and censored data sets has been developed. The two-parameter and the three-parameter versions of the logistic–exponential distribution are applied to two real-life data sets. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 55: 252–264, 2008