Reliability Analysis: Fundamental Aspects and Methods
Organizer and Session Chair: Sneh Gulati, Florida International UniversityProductivity and Reliability Aspects in Drug Development
Amarjot Kaur and Ansuman Bagchi
Merck and Schering Plough
The drug development is a long and complex process that primarily hinges on four development stages: drug discovery, preclinical development, clinical development, and manufacturing. Since the development process entails high costs and competitive timelines, it requires utility of innovative and reliable methods for effective decision making and to help standardize processes. The ultimate goal is to increase productivity and to shorten time between discovery and marketing of products. In this presentation we will discuss the aspects of reliability and productivity as encountered at various stages of the drug development along with relevant illustrative examples.
Goodness-of-Fit Tests Based on Arbitrarily Censored Samples
Zhenmin Chen
Florida International University
The goal of the goodness-of-fit test is to check whether the underlying probability distribution, from which a sample is drawn, differs from a hypothesized distribution. Numerous research papers have been published in this area. The purpose of this paper is to provide a goodness-of-fit test statistic which works for any kind of censored data formed by order statistics. While the test statistic is developed for testing whether the underlying probability distribution differs from a uniform distribution, the test statistic can be used to check whether the underlying distribution differs from any hypothesized distribution as well. The performance of the method proposed in this research is evaluated using Monte Carlo simulation.
Anatomy of the Failure Rate Function: A Mathematical Dissection
Nozer D. Singpurwalla
DARPA and George Washington University
The failure rate function plays a key role in engineering reliability, survival analysis, actuarial work, mathematical finance, forensic science, and warrantology. In this talk I explore some subtle aspects of the failure rate function, including a paradox that it spawns, and argue that the commonly used exponentiation formula used by engineers does not always hold.