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Re: Weibull questions

To: Kamil Toth <kamiltoth@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Weibull questions
From: Spencer Graves <spencer.graves@pdf.com>
Date: Sun, 16 May 2004 14:51:11 -0700
Cc: s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu
In-reply-to: <20040516191431.60811.qmail@web61306.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20040516191431.60811.qmail@web61306.mail.yahoo.com>
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)
1. I can think of 4 plausible parameterizations for the Weibull distribution: Pr(T>t) = exp(-(t/tau)^a), exp(-(b*t)^a), exp(-c*t^a, exp(-(t^a)/d). To find out which is being used, consider the following:
> pweibull(a=1, shape=1, scale=1)
[1] 0.6321206
> pweibull(1, 2, 1)
[1] 0.6321206
> pweibull(2, 1, 2)
[1] 0.6321206
> pweibull(2, 2, 2)
[1] 0.6321206

Unless I'm missing something, this looks like Pr(T>q) = exp(-(q/scale)^shape). 2. If you have censored data, then you need to look for methods for censored data, e.g., in Venables and Ripley, Modern Applied Statistics with S. If no observations are censored, then have you considered "fitdistr" in library(MASS)? 3. If you can't guess "rweibull", then Help -> "Online Manuals" -> "Guide to Statistics, vol. 1" -> Index of Search -> Weibull will identify "rweibull" for generating pseudo-random numbers following a Weibull distribution. Hope this help. Bon chance. Spencer Graves

Kamil Toth wrote:

Folks:
I have several questions regarding the Weibull distribution and its implementation in S+ 1. There are known two analytical forms of Weibull distribution. Which form exactly is implemented in S+ and what is the meaning of the parameter "scale" in this form? 2. What would be the best method to fit the Weibull distribution? I am trying to avoid the method of moments, however I was not able to obtain a fast result with the max likelihood either. 3. What is the method for generating Weibull-distributed random numbers? Thank you Kamil Toth
Ecole Normale Superierre
Paris, France
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