Modification of: error log analysis: statistical modeling and heuristic trend analysis

The above-titled paper by T.-T.Y. Lin and D.P. Siewiorek (see ibid., vol.39, p.419-32, Oct. 1990) used traditional statistical analysis to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed dispersion frame technique. The purpose was to distinguish between transient and intermittent errors and predict the occurrence of intermittent errors. It is shown here that those traditional statistical methods were too traditional, since they involved fitting a distribution to data which were not identically distributed. Appropriate statistical techniques for fitting models to such nonstationary data are briefly discussed, and reasons are proffered for the persistence of too-traditional statistical methods in the reliability literature