Seminar by Prof. Chin-Diew Lai

Ageing distributions play a fundamental role in a lifetime study.  The hazard rate is central to reliability engineers, actuaries, demographers and other disciplines for reason such as its interpretation as the amount of risk that an device or subject exposed at time. In reliability analysis, often it is the final behavior of the hazard rate that is of interest.  A hazard rate function eventually converges to zero, goes to infinity or asymptotes to a constant.

We first describe and provide a background of human/nonhuman late-life mortality levelling off phenomenon.  We then investigate and provide several classes of distributions having hazard rates ultimately decelerating to a plateau.