Approximate MLE for the Scale Parameter of the Weibull Distribution with Type-II Censoring

It is known that the maximum likelihood method does not provide explicit estimator for the scale parameter of the Weibull distribution based on Type-II censored samples. In this paper we provide an approximate maximum likelihood estimator (AMLE) of the scale parameter of the Weibull distribution with Type-II censoring. We obtain the asymptotic variance and simulate the values of the bias and the variance of this estimator based on 3000 Monte Carlo runs for n = 10(10)30 and r,s = 0(1)4. We also simulate the absolute biases of the MLE and the proposed AMLE for complete samples. It is found that the absolute bias of the AMLE is smaller than the absolute bias of the MLE.