Characterization of Continuous Distributions by Variance Bound and Its Implications to Reliability Modeling and Catastrophe Theory

Abstract

We generalize some of the existing results on characterization of continuous distributions by lower bound on the variance and point out their equivalence to characterization of life distributions by relationship between conditional expectation and failure (reversed failure) rate. It is shown that these lower bounds are the same as, Cramer–Rao bound in the regular case and improves upon the latter in the non-regular case. Some applications to reliability modeling and catastrophe theory are pointed out.