Order statistics in goodness-of-fit testing

Abstract

Our new method uses order statistics to judge the fit of a distribution to data. A test-statistic based on quantiles of order-statistics compares favorably with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) and Anderson-Darling (A-D) test statistics. The performance of this new goodness-of-fit test statistic is examined with simulation experiments. For certain hypothesis tests, the test statistic is more powerful than the K-S and A-D test statistics. The new test statistic is calculated using a computer algebra system because of the need to compute exact distributions of order statistics.