Empirical likelihood ratio tests for homogeneity of component lifetime distributions based on system lifetime data.

In system reliability, practitioners may be interested in testing the homogeneity of the component lifetime distributions based on system lifetimes from multiple data sources for various reasons, such as identifying the component supplier that provides the most reliable components. In this paper, we develop distribution-free hypothesis testing procedures for the homogeneity of the component lifetime distributions based on system lifetime data when the system structures are known. Several nonparametric testing statistics based on the empirical likelihood method are proposed for testing the homogeneity of two or more component lifetime distributions. The computational approaches to obtain the critical values of the proposed test procedures are provided. The performances of the proposed empirical likelihood ratio test procedures are evaluated and compared to the nonparametric Mann–Whitney U test and some parametric test procedures. The simulation results show that the proposed test procedures provide comparable power performance under different sample sizes and underlying component lifetime distributions, and they are powerful in detecting changes in the shape of the distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]