An Empirical Bayes Approach to Reliability

A Bayesian reliability estimation technique known as the ``empirical Bayes approach'' is developed which uses previous experience nce to get a Bayesian point estimator. The techniques require no knowledge of the form of the unknown prior distribution and are robust to assumptions about its form. Empirical Bayes techniques are applicable to situations in which prior, independent observations of the random variable X from the random couple (Θ, X) are available where Θ is the observed parameter of interest distributed in accordance with the unknown prior distribution. Performance comparisons of the empirical Bayes and other well established techniques are developed by examples for the binomial, exponential, Normal, and Poisson situations which often occur in reliability problems. In all cases the empirical Bayes estimator performed better than the classical estimator in minimizing the average squared error.