Inference of constant-stress accelerated life test for a truncated distribution under progressive censoring

Accelerated life test (ALT) provides a feasible and efficient way to obtain information quickly on lifetime of products by testing them at higher-than-use operating conditions. In this paper, the lifetime of products is assumed to follow a lower truncated family of distributions, when both resilience and threshold parameters are nonconstant and affected by operating stress, inference is discussed for simple constant-stress ALT under progressive Type-II censoring. Point estimates for unknown parameters are presented based on maximum likelihood and pivotal quantities based estimation methods. Meanwhile, generalized, asymptotic and bootstrap confidence intervals for the parameters of interest are constructed as well. Simulation studies and illustrative examples are carried out to investigate the performance of the proposed methods. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.