Empirical Bayes Estimation in the Weibull Distribution

In part I empirical Bayes estimation procedures are introduced and employed to obtain an estimator for the unknown random scale parameter of a two-parameter Weibull distribution with known shape parameter. In part II, procedures are developed for estimating both the random scale and shape parameters. These estimators use a sequence of maximum likelihood estimates from related reliability experiments to form an empirical estimate of the appropriate unknown prior probability density function. Monte Carlo simulation is used to compare the performance of these estimators with the appropriate maximum likelihood estimator. Algorithms are presented for sequentially obtaining the reduced sample sizes required by the estimators while still providing mean squared error accuracy compatible with the use of the maximum likelihood estimators. In some cases whenever the prior pdf is a member of the Pearson family of distributions, as much as a 60% reduction in total test units is obtained. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the procedures.