Hazard Plots

[Anonymous]

I was asked to create a hazard plot? Can somebody help me with some references?

[RS Support]

I am assuming that you are familiar with probability plots. If not see section at http://www.weibull.com/LifeDataWeb/probability_plotting.htm, as well as other multiple examples for different distributions and censoring schemes that can be found from the table of contents at http://www.weibull.com/LifeDataWeb/lifedataweb.htm. Weibull++ 6 (http://weibull.reliasoft.com) provides such functionality.

With regards to hazard plots, note that probability Plots and Hazard Plots are the same for all practical purposes. In other words the probability plot that you get from Weibull 6 serves the same purpose as a Hazard Plot. Hazard plotting is nothing more than another method to create a plot from the data, based on an assumed distribution and determine its parameters, much like a probability plot. It was presented/introduced by Wayne Nelson in his "Applied Life Data Analysis" [John Wiley & Sons, 1982] book as an easier alternative to probability plotting, but is no longer widely used since most software today (such as Weibull++) easily create probability plots. In other words, providing a probability plot serves the same purpose as providing a hazard plot.
As a side note, in the textbook mentioned above, that introduces hazard plots, the author also states what I mentioned above on pages 146-147, specifically: "Probability plots of multiply censored data can be used instead of hazard plots. Hazard Plots are less work but require special plotting paper. Probability and hazard plots of the same data are the same for practical purposes..."