An imprecise Dirichlet model for Bayesian analysis of failure data including right-censored observations

This paper is intended to make researchers in reliability theory aware of a recently introduced Bayesian model with imprecise prior distributions for statistical inference on failure data, that can also be considered as a robust Bayesian model. The model consists of a multinomial distribution with Dirichlet priors, making the approach basically nonparametric. New results for the model are presented, related to right-censored observations, where estimation based on this model is closely related to the product-limit estimator, which is an important statistical method to deal with reliability or survival data including right-censored observations. As for the product-limit estimator, the model considered in this paper aims at not using any information other than that provided by observed data, but our model fits into the robust Bayesian context which has the advantage that all inferences can be based on probabilities or expectations, or bounds for probabilities or expectations. The model uses a finite partition of the time-axis, and as such it is also related to life-tables.