Application of the Box-Tidwell Transformation in Reliability Modeling

This paper takes the example of the power-law model used in reliability growth analysis and demonstrates the application and effectiveness of the robust Box-Tidwell. Extensive simulation modelling has shown it generally provides a better fit to the data than the alternative maximum likelihood estimates. It illustrates that maximum likelihood methods do not always provide the "best" estimator in the sense of one that minimizes a suitable loss funciton.