Imprecise probability inference on masked multicomponent system

Abstract

Outside of controlled experiment scope, we have only limited information available to carry out desired inferences. One such scenario is when we wish to infer the topology of a system given only data representing system lifetimes without information about states of components in time of system failure, and only limited information about lifetimes of the components of which the system is composed. This scenario, masked system inference, has been studied before for systems with only one component type, with interest of inferring both system topology and lifetime distribution of component composing it. In this paper we study similar scenario in which we consider systems consisting of multiple types of components. We assume that distribution of component lifetimes is known to belong to a prior-specified set of distributions and our intention is to reflect this information via a set of likelihood functions which will be used to obtain an imprecise posterior on the set of considered system topologies.