Estimation of the Confidence Interval for the Ratio of the Coefficients of Variation of Two Weibull Distributions and Its Application to Wind Speed Data

Abstract

The Weibull distribution, one of the most significant distributions with applications in numerous fields, is associated with numerous distributions such as generalized gamma distribution, exponential distribution, and Rayleigh distribution, which are asymmetric. Nevertheless, it shares a close relationship with a normal distribution where a process of transformation allows them to become symmetric. The Weibull distribution is commonly used to study the failure of components and phenomena. It has been applied to a variety of scenarios, including failure time, claims amount, unemployment duration, survival time, and especially wind speed data. A suitable area for installing a wind turbine requires a wind speed that is both sufficiently high and consistent, and so comparing the variation in wind speed in two areas is eminently desirable. In this paper, methods to estimate the confidence interval for the ratio of the coefficients of variation of two Weibull distributions are proposed and applied to compare the variation in wind speed in two areas. The methods are the generalized confidence interval (GCI), the method of variance estimates recovery (MOVER), and Bayesian methods based on the gamma and uniform priors. The Bayesian methods comprise the equal-tailed confidence interval and the highest posterior density (HPD) interval. The effectiveness of the methods was evaluated in terms of their coverage probabilities and expected lengths and also empirically applied to wind speed datasets from two different areas in Thailand. The results indicate that the HPD interval based on the uniform prior outperformed the others in most of the scenarios tested and so it is suggested for estimating the confidence interval for the ratio of the coefficients of variation of two Weibull distributions.