GENERALIZED LOG-NORMAL DISTRIBUTIONS WITH RELIABILITY APPLICATION

A specific scale must be used to collect data in an experiment, but this scare may or may not be the appropriate scale to analyze the data thus collected. In this paper, we study a family of three-parameter distributions which includes the log-normal distribution as a special case, and one of the parameters plays the role of choosing a suitable scale for subsequent analysis. Some basic properties and maximum likelihood estimation of the unknown parameters are discussed, and an easy-to-use goodness-of-fit test is developed. A real data set, to which the usual Weibull, log-normal and gamma distributions cannot be fitted, is used to demonstrate the potential applicability of this family of distributions.