No Arabic abstract
In this paper we extend the Weibull power series (WPS) class of distributions and named this new class as extended Weibull power series (EWPS) class of distributions. The EWPS distributions are related to series and parallel systems with a random num- ber of components, whereas the WPS distributions (Morais and Barreto-Souza, 2011) are related to series systems only. Unlike the WPS distributions, for which the Weibull is a limiting special case, the Weibull law is a particular case of the EWPS distributions. We prove that the distributions in this class are identifiable under a simple assumption. We also prove stochastic and hazard rate order results and highlight that the shapes of the EWPS distributions are markedly more flexible than the shapes of the WPS distributions. We define a regression model for the EWPS response random variable to model a scale parameter and its quantiles. We present the maximum likelihood estimator and prove its consistency and normal asymptotic distribution. Although the construction of this class was motivated by series and parallel systems, the EWPS distributions are suitable for modeling a wide range of positive data sets. To illustrate potential uses of this model, we apply it to a real data set on the tensile strength of coconut fibers and present a simple device for diagnostic purposes.
Regression mixture models are widely studied in statistics, machine learning and data analysis. Fitting regression mixtures is challenging and is usually performed by maximum likelihood by using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. However, it is well-known that the initialization is crucial for EM. If the initialization is inappropriately performed, the EM algorithm may lead to unsatisfactory results. The EM algorithm also requires the number of clusters to be given a priori; the problem of selecting the number of mixture components requires using model selection criteria to choose one from a set of pre-estimated candidate models. We propose a new fully unsupervised algorithm to learn regression mixture models with unknown number of components. The developed unsupervised learning approach consists in a penalized maximum likelihood estimation carried out by a robust expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for fitting polynomial, spline and B-spline regressions mixtures. The proposed learning approach is fully unsupervised: 1) it simultaneously infers the model parameters and the optimal number of the regression mixture components from the data as the learning proceeds, rather than in a two-fold scheme as in standard model-based clustering using afterward model selection criteria, and 2) it does not require accurate initialization unlike the standard EM for regression mixtures. The developed approach is applied to curve clustering problems. Numerical experiments on simulated data show that the proposed robust EM algorithm performs well and provides accurate results in terms of robustness with regard initialization and retrieving the optimal partition with the actual number of clusters. An application to real data in the framework of functional data clustering, confirms the benefit of the proposed approach for practical applications.
A new class of copulas, termed the MGL copula class, is introduced. The new copula originates from extracting the dependence function of the multivariate generalized log-Moyal-gamma distribution whose marginals follow the univariate generalized log-Moyal-gamma (GLMGA) distribution as introduced in citet{li2019jan}. The MGL copula can capture nonelliptical, exchangeable, and asymmetric dependencies among marginal coordinates and provides a simple formulation for regression applications. We discuss the probabilistic characteristics of MGL copula and obtain the corresponding extreme-value copula, named the MGL-EV copula. While the survival MGL copula can be also regarded as a special case of the MGB2 copula from citet{yang2011generalized}, we show that the proposed model is effective in regression modelling of dependence structures. Next to a simulation study, we propose two applications illustrating the usefulness of the proposed model. This method is also implemented in a user-friendly R package: texttt{rMGLReg}.
In the context of industrial engineering, cold-standby redundancies allocation strategy is usually adopted to improve the reliability of coherent systems. This paper investigates optimal allocation strategies of cold standbys for series and parallel systems comprised of dependent components with left/right tail weakly stochastic arrangement increasing lifetimes. For the case of heterogeneous and independent matched cold standbys, it is proved that better redundancies should be put in the nodes having weaker [better] components for series [parallel] systems. For the case of homogeneous and independent cold standbys, it is shown that more redundancies should be put in standby with weaker [better] components to enhance the reliability of series [parallel] systems. The results developed here generalize and extend those corresponding ones in the literature to the case of series and parallel systems with dependent components. Numerical examples are also presented to provide guidance for the practical use of our theoretical findings.
We introduce a new approach to a linear-circular regression problem that relates multiple linear predictors to a circular response. We follow a modeling approach of a wrapped normal distribution that describes angular variables and angular distributions and advances it for a linear-circular regression analysis. Some previous works model a circular variable as projection of a bivariate Gaussian random vector on the unit square, and the statistical inference of the resulting model involves complicated sampling steps. The proposed model treats circular responses as the result of the modulo operation on unobserved linear responses. The resulting model is a mixture of multiple linear-linear regression models. We present two EM algorithms for maximum likelihood estimation of the mixture model, one for a parametric model and another for a non-parametric model. The estimation algorithms provide a great trade-off between computation and estimation accuracy, which was numerically shown using five numerical examples. The proposed approach was applied to a problem of estimating wind directions that typically exhibit complex patterns with large variation and circularity.
We consider an equivariant approach imposing data-driven bounds for the variances to avoid singular and spurious solutions in maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of clusterwise linear regression models. We investigate its use in the choice of the number of components and we propose a computational shortcut, which significantly reduces the computational time needed to tune the bounds on the data. In the simulation study and the two real-data applications, we show that the proposed methods guarantee a reliable assessment of the number of components compared to standard unconstrained methods, together with accurate model parameters estimation and cluster recovery.