On the Three-Parameter Burr Type XII Distribution and its Application to Heavy Tailed Lifetime Data

Abstract

This paper identifies the characteristics of three-parameter Burr Type XII distribution and discusses its utility in survivorship applications. It addresses the problem of estimating the three-parameter Burr XII distribution and its doubly truncated version. The results are applied on a real dataset by fitting the distribution to the survival time of breast cancer patients in the Gaza Strip. These data are known to have a heavy tailed distribution since patients in this area received different protocols of treatments in different levels of hospitals locally and abroad. The findings indicated that the estimates of the parameters of the truncated distribution are more efficient than those obtained from the original distribution since the distribution is heavy tailed and involves many highly extreme observations.