Forcing a Closer Fit in the Lower Tails of a Distribution for Better Estimating Extremely Small Percentiles of Strengths

We use a novel, forced censoring technique that closer fits the lower tails of strenth distributions to better estimate extremly smaller percentiles for measuring progress in continuous improvement initiatives. These percentiles are of greater interest for companies, government oversight organizations, and consumers concerned with safely and preventing accidents for many products in general, but specifically for medium density fiberboard (MDF). The international industrial standard for MDF for measuring highest quality is internal bond (IB, also called tensile strengh) and its smaller percentiles are crucial, especially the first percentile and lower ones. We induce censoring at a value just above the median to weight lower observations more. Using this approach, we have better fits in the lower tails of the distribution, where these samller percentiles are impacted most. Finally, bootstrap estimates of the small percentiles are used to demonstrate improved intervals by our forced censoring approach and the fitted model. There was evidence from the study to suggest that MDF has potentially different failure modes for early failures. Overall, our approach is parsimonious and is suitable for real time manufacturing settings. The approach works for either strengths distributions or lifetime distributions.