Multivariate Inverted Kumaraswamy Distribution: Derivation and Estimation

Industrial revolution leads to the manufacturing of multicomponent products; to guarantee the sufficiency of the product and consumer satisfaction, the producer has to study the lifetime of the products. This leads to the use of bivariate and multivariate lifetime distributions in reliability engineering. The most popular and applicable is Marshall–Olkin family of distributions. In this paper, a new bivariate lifetime distribution which is the bivariate inverted Kumaraswamy (BIK) distribution is found and its properties are illustrated. Estimation using both maximum likelihood and Bayesian approaches is accomplished. Using different selection criteria, it is found that BIK provides the best performance compared with other bivariate distributions like bivariate exponential and bivariate inverse Weibull distributions. As a generalization, the multivariate inverted Kumaraswamy (MIK) distribution is derived. Few studies have been conducted on the multivariate Marshall–Olkin lifetime distributions. To the best of our knowledge, none of them handle estimation process. In this paper, we developed an algorithm to show how to estimate the unknown parameters of MIK using both maximum likelihood and Bayesian approaches. This algorithm could be applied in estimating other Marshall–Olkin multivariate lifetime distributions.