Revisiting Relations between Stochastic Ageing and Dependence for Exchangeable Lifetimes with an Extension for the IFRA/DFRA Property

We first review an approach that had been developed in the past years to introduce concepts of "bivariate ageing" for exchangeable lifetimes and to analyze mutual relations among stochastic dependence, univariate ageing, and bivariate ageing. A specific feature of such an approach dwells on the concept of semi-copula and in the extension, from copulas to semi-copulas, of properties of stochastic dependence. In this perspective, we aim to discuss some intricate aspects of conceptual character and to provide the readers with pertinent remarks from a Bayesian Statistics standpoint. In particular we will discuss the role of extensions of dependence properties. "Archimedean" models have an important role in the present framework. In the second part of the paper, the definitions of Kendall distribution and of Kendall equivalence classes will be extended to semi-copulas and related properties will be analyzed. On such a basis, we will consider the notion of "Pseudo-Archimedean" models and extend to them the analysis of the relations between the ageing notions of IFRA/DFRA-type and the dependence concepts of PKD/NKD

Semicopulae

We define the notion of semicopula, a concept that has already appeared in the statistical literature and study the properties of semicopulas and the connexion of this notion with those of copula, quasi-copula, t-nor

The importance of being the upper bound in the bivariate family

Any bivariate cdf is bounded by the Fréchet-Hoeffding lower and upper bounds. We illustrate the importance of the upper bound in several ways. Any bivariate distribution can be written in terms of this bound, which is implicit in logit analysis and the Lorenz curve, and can be used in goodness-of-fit assesment. Any random variable can be expanded in terms of some functions related to this bound. The Bayes approach in comparing two proportions can be presented as the problem of choosing a parametric prior distribution which puts mass on the null hypothesis. Accepting this hypothesis is equivalent to reaching the upper bound. We also present some parametric families making emphasis on this bound