Advances in Degradation Modeling: Applications to Reliability, Survival Analysis, and Finance

William Q. Meeker has made pioneering and phenomenal contributions to the general areaofreliabilityand,inparticular,tothetopicsofdegradationandacceleratedtesting. Hisresearchpublicationsandthenumerouscitationshehasreceivedoverthepastthree decades provide an ample testimony to this fact. Statistical methods have become critical in analyzing reliability and survival data. Highly reliable products have necessitated the development of accelerated testing and degradation models and their analyses. This volume has been put together in order to (i) review some of the recent advances on accelerated testing and degradation, (ii) highlight some new results and discuss their applications, and (iii) suggest possible directions for future research in these topics. With these speci?c goals in mind, many authors were invited to write a chapter for this volume. These authors are not only experts in lifetime data analysis, but also form a representative group from former students, colleagues, and other close professional associates of William Meeker. All contributions have been peer reviewed and organized into 26 chapters. For the convenience of readers, the volume has been divided into the following six parts: • Review, Tutorials, and Perspective • Shock Models • Degradation Models • Reliability Estimation and ALT • Survival Function Estimation • Competing Risk and Chaotic Systems Itneedstobeemphasizedherethatthisvolumeisnotaproceedings,butacarefully anddeliberatelyplannedvolumecomprisingchaptersconsistentwiththeeditorialgoals and purposes mentioned above. Our thanks go to all the authors who have contributed to this volume. Thanks are also due to Mrs. Debbie Iscoe for the excellent typesetting of the entire volume.SpecialthanksgotoMs.ReginaGorenshteynandMr.TomGrasso(Editor,Birkh¨ auser, Boston) for their interest and support for this project.

This volume―dedicated to William Q. Meeker on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday―is a collection of invited chapters covering recent advances in accelerated life testing and degradation models. The book covers a wide range of applications to areas such as reliability, quality control, the health sciences, economics, and finance.

Specific topics covered include:

* Accelerated testing and inference

* Step-stress testing and inference

* Nonparametric inference

* Model validity in accelerated testing

* The point process approach

* Bootstrap methods in degradation analysis

* Exact inferential methods in reliability

* Dynamic perturbed systems

* Degradation models in statistics

Advances in Degradation Modeling is an excellent reference for researchers and practitioners in applied probability and statistics, industrial statistics, the health sciences, quality control, economics, and finance.