PH FITTING ALGORITHM AND ITS APPLICATION TO RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

This article presents parameter estimation of phase-type (PH) distribution. PH distribution is widely used in model-based performance evaluation such as reliability and queueing system, and is defied by an absorbing continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC). Since non-Markovian model can be approximated by a CTMC by replacing general distributions with PH distributions, the parameter estimation is a challenging issue in stochastic modeling. We focus on the statistical inference algorithms to estimate not only the parameters of PH distribution with grouped, truncated and missing data but also the probability density function, and give two examples of PH fitting in reliability engineering.