A Personal View of the Bayesian Controversy in Reliability and Statistics

There appear to be two important developing trends in reliability. One is away from the use of statistics by reliability engineers; the other is toward increased use of Bayesian techniques. One source of the latter may be disillusionment with what is regarded as classical statistics; however, one source of the former may be dissatisfaction with what has been called Bayesian statistics. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these trends and to present a personal view of the issues between classical and Bayesian statistics. The objective is to show that there is some substance to the classical statistician's opposition to Bayesian inference and that the issues are pertinent and meaningful to the reliability engineer.