A New Two-Sided Class of Lifetime Distributions: Applications to Complete and Right Censored Data

In this article, we first define a new two-sided distribution called the two-sided Kumaraswamy distribution and then we propose a generalized class of lifetime distributions via compounding two-sided Kumaraswamy and a baseline distribution. One of the advantages of this class of new distributions is that they can be unimodal or bimodal. The general model is specified by taking the exponential distribution as the baseline distribution. Some basic properties of the proposed distribution are derived. The model parameters are estimated by means of maximum likelihood method. In addition, parametric and non-parametric bootstrap procedures are used to obtain point estimates and confidence intervals of the parameters of the model. A simulation study has been conducted to examine the bias and the mean square error of the maximum likelihood estimators. We illustrate the performance of the proposed distribution by means of two real data sets (one is complete data set and other is right censored data set) and both the data sets show that the new distribution is more appropriate as compared to Weibull, gamma, weighted exponential, generalized two-sided exponential, generalized transmuted two-sided exponential and generalized exponential distributions.