Journal of Data Science

Providing a new distribution is always precious for statisticians. A new three parameter distribution called the gamma normal distribution is defined and studied. Various structural properties of the new distribution are derived, including some explicit expressions for the moments, quantile and generating functions, mean deviations, probability weighted moments and two types of entropy. We also investigate the order statistics and their moments. Maximum likelihood techniques are used to fit the new model and to show its potentiality by means of two examples of real data. Based on three criteria, the proposed distribution provides a better fit then the skew-normal distribution.

Abstract: Shared frailty models are often used to model heterogeneity in survival analysis. The most common shared frailty model is a model in which hazard function is a product of random factor (frailty) and baseline hazard function which is common to all individuals. There are certain as sumptions about the baseline distribution and distribution of frailty. Mostly assumption of gamma distribution is considered for frailty distribution. To compare the results with gamma frailty model, we introduce three shared frailty models with generalized exponential as baseline distribution. The other three shared frailty models are inverse Gaussian shared frailty model, compound Poisson shared frailty model and compound negative binomial shared frailty model. We fit these models to a real life bivariate survival data set of McGilchrist and Aisbett (1991) related to kidney infection using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique. Model comparison is made using Bayesian model selection criteria and a better model is suggested for the data.