Notice of Retraction: Modeling degradation with a new independent increment process

Degradation test is an important technique to assess the failure time distribution of complex systems and high reliable products. The effectiveness of a degradation model depends strongly on the appropriateness of the model describing the degradation process. In this paper, a new degradation model is proposed, in which the characteristics of the widely-used stochastic process model and degradation path model are considered simultaneously. Using the proposed degradation model, closed-form expressions of performance distribution, failure time distribution and their percentiles can be obtained easily. Then a one-stage procedure is developed to estimate the model parameters, the performance distribution and failure time distribution. Furthermore, simulation studies are conducted to validate the proposed method, results show that the method provides much precise estimates even for very small sample size of about 5.