Competing risks driven by Mittag-Leffler distributions, under copula and time transformed exponential model.

We consider a stochastic model for competing risks involving the Mittag-Leffler distribution, inspired by fractional random growth phenomena. We prove the independence between the time to failure and the cause of failure, and investigate some properties of the related hazard rates and ageing notions. We also face the general problem of identifying the underlying distribution of latent failure times when their joint distribution is expressed in terms of copulas and the time transformed exponential model. The special case concerning the Mittag-Leffler distribution is approached by means of numerical treatment. We finally adapt the proposed model to the case of a random number of independent competing risks. This leads to certain mixtures of Mittag-Leffler distributions, whose parameters are estimated through the method of moments for fractional moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]