A new estimator for Weibull distribution parameters: Comprehensive comparative study for Weibull Distribution

Abstract

Weibull distribution has received a wide range of applications in engineering and science. The utility and usefulness of an estimator is highly subject to the field of practitioner's study. In practice users looking for their desired estimator under different setting of parameters and sample sizes. In this paper we focus on two topics. Firstly, we propose $U$-statistics for the Weibull distribution parameters. The consistency and asymptotically normality of the introduced $U$-statistics are proved theoretically and by simulations. Several of methods have been proposed for estimating the parameters of Weibull distribution in the literature. These methods include: the generalized least square type 1, the generalized least square type 2, the $L$-moments, the Logarithmic moments, the maximum likelihood estimation, the method of moments, the percentile method, the weighted least square, and weighted maximum likelihood estimation. Secondary, due to lack of a comprehensive comparison between the Weibull distribution parameters estimators, a comprehensive comparison study is made between our proposed $U$-statistics and above nine estimators. Based on simulations, it turns out that the our proposed $U$-statistics show the best performance in terms of bias for estimating the shape and scale parameters when the sample size is large.