An alternative rule for placement of empirical points on Weibull probability paper.

This paper proposes an alternative rule for placing empirical points on Weibull probability paper. Following the standard or old rule, one takes the mean or median value of the order statistics first, then performs the Weibull transformation. The new rule is to make the Weibull transformation first, then take the expected value of the transformed order statistics. Although the new rule for placing points requires much more complicated calculations, a simple Monte Carlo experiment shows that the new rule estimator of the shape parameter is unbiased, whereas the old rule estimator turns out to be heavily biased. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]