Adaptive progressive censoring

Abstract

The notion of adaptive progressive Type-II censoring has been introduced in Cramer and Iliopoulos (2010) to analyse data from a progressively Type-II censored life test with observation dependent removals of units. Such a scheme gives more flexibility to the experimenter since it allows him/her to choose the number of units to be removed at each failure time during the life test. In this paper, the idea is generalised to a more general setting of progressive censoring. Our generalised model allows for arbitrary inspection times and possible removals of units during the experiment. The inspection times and removals depend on what has been observed so far. In particular, this approach includes adaptive progressive Type-I and Type-II censoring with random or fixed inspection timepoints.