A NEW ALGORITHM FOR ESTIMATING THE PARAMETERS OF THE THREE-PARAMETER WEIBULL DISTRIBUTION

Abstract

In this work we propose an algorithm for estimating the parameters of the three-parameter Weibull distribution. The proposed algorithm is an extension of the closed form estimator for the shape parameter proposed by Teimouri and Gupta (2013). We compared the proposed algorithm with Teimouri and Gupta’s estimator and found out that the proposed method performs better when ????>1, however when ?????1 the Teimouri and Gupta estimator is prefered. We also discovered that the performance of the methods always increases with sample size. The proposed method also provides a prior knowledge of a likely range of the true shape parameter value.