In progressive censoring, items are removed at certain times during the life test. Commonly, it is assumed that the removed items are used for further testing. In order to take into account information about these additional testing in inferential procedures, we propose a two‐step model of stage life testing with one fixed stage‐change time which incorporates information about both the removed items (further tested under different conditions) and those remaining in the current life test. We show that some marginal distributions in our model correspond either to progressive censoring with a fixed censoring time or to a simple‐step stress model. Furthermore, assuming a cumulative exposure model, we establish exact inferential results for the distribution parameters when the lifetimes are exponentially distributed. An extension to Weibull distributed lifetimes is also discussed.
The model of stage life testing proposed in Laumen and Cramer (2019b) is extended from two to k stages. It is illustrated that this model can be seen as an extension of progressive censoring with fixed censoring times as well as of simple step stress testing. Extending the first model, the new approach allows to incorporate information from progressively censored units subject to additional life testing. On the other hand, simple step stress modeling is generalized in the sense that only parts of the units under test are put on another stress level whereas the others remain on the initial level. The model is further studied for exponential lifetimes assuming a cumulative exposure model. We obtain the exact (conditional) distribution of the maximum likelihood estimators which is applied to construct (exact) confidence intervals for the distribution parameters. Finally, we investigate the situation of Weibull distributed lifetimes on the initial stage. The study is supplemented by illustrative simulations.
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