Recurrence relations for moments of progressively censored order statistics from logistic distribution with applications to inference

In this paper, we establish several recurrence relations for the single and product moments of progressively Type-II right censored order statistics from a logistic distribution. The use of these relations in a systematic manner allows us to compute all the means, variances and covariances of progressively Type-ll right censored order statistics from the logistic distribution for all sample sizes n, effective sample sizes m, and all progressive censoring schemes (R-1,...,R-m). The results established here generalize the corresponding results for the usual order statistics due to Shah (1966, 1970). These moments are then utilized to derive best linear unbiased estimators of the location and scale parameters of the logistic distribution. A comparison of these estimators with the maximum likelihood estimations is then made. The best linear unbiased predictors of censored failure times are briefly discussed. Finally, an illustrative example is presented. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.