Statistical Analysis of Competing Failure Modes in Accelerated Life Testing Based on Assumed Copulas

Among those papers discussing statistical analysis of competing failure data, most of them assume independence for failure modes. In this paper we use copula as the dependence link function to assess competing risk models in accelerated life testing. We compare via simulation the results of lifetime when the failure modes are dependent with those when the failure modes are independent, and apply our approach to a real data set in the literature.