An Analysis for Incomplete Warranty Data Based on a Pseudo-Likelihood Method

• Activity Number: 538
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences
• Author(s): Yu Qiu*+
• Companies: Iowa State University
• Keywords: INCOMPLETE DATA ; MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ; PSEUDO-LOG-LIKELIHOOD

Abstract

Warranty data are used by most manufacturing companies for tracking warranty costs. Different but potentially important applications of warranty data are to quantify the relationship between use rate and product time-to-first-failure and to estimate the probability of unit initial failure after a given period of ownership (which depends on both use rate and the potential failure rate under continuous usage). But in many situations, some parts of the usage data are missing for a variety of practical reasons. In this paper we introduce a pseudo-likelihood procedure for dealing with some kinds of incomplete warranty data. Based on this methodology we estimate unit failure probability by a given time after purchase and the time associated with a given cumulative probability of first failure. The methods are motivated by real data from a machine company.