Essays on multivariate generalized Birnbaum-Saunders methods

Abstract

In the last decades, univariate Birnbaum-Saunders models have received considerable attention in the literature. These models have been widely studied and applied to fatigue, but they have also been applied to other areas of the knowledge. In such areas, it is often necessary to model several variables simultaneously. If these variables are correlated, individual analyses for each variable can lead to erroneous results. Multivariate regression models are a useful tool of the multivariate analysis, which takes into account the correlation between variables. In addition, diagnostic analysis is an important aspect to be considered in the statistical modeling. Furthermore, multivariate quality control charts are powerful and simple visual tools to determine whether a multivariate process is in control or out of control. A multivariate control chart shows how several variables jointly affect a process. First, we propose, derive and characterize multivariate generalized logarithmic Birnbaum-Saunders distributions. Also, we propose new multivariate generalized Birnbaum-Saunders regression models. We use the method of maximum likelihood estimation to estimate their parameters through the expectation-maximization algorithm. We carry out a simulation study to evaluate the performance of the corresponding estimators based on the Monte Carlo method. We validate the proposed models with a regression analysis of real-world multivariate fatigue data. Second, we conduct a diagnostic analysis for multivariate generalized Birnbaum-Saunders regression models. We consider the Mahalanobis distance as a global influence measure to detect multivariate outliers and use it for evaluating the adequacy of the distributional assumption. Moreover, we consider the local influence method and study how a perturbation may impact on the estimation of model parameters. We implement the obtained results in the R software, which are illustrated with real-world multivariate biomaterials data. Third and finally, we develop a robust methodology based on multivariate quality control charts for generalized Birnbaum-Saunders distributions with the Hotelling statistic. We use the parametric bootstrap method to obtain the distribution of this statistic. A Monte Carlo simulation study is conducted to evaluate the proposed methodology, which reports its performance to provide earlier alerts of out-of-control conditions. An illustration with air quality real-world data of Santiago-Chile is provided. This illustration shows that the proposed methodology can be useful for alerting episodes of extreme air pollution.