Some New Facts about the Unit-Rayleigh Distribution with Applications

The unit-Rayleigh distribution is a one-parameter distribution with support on the unit interval. It is defined as the so-called unit-Weibull distribution with a shape parameter equal to two. As a particular case among others, it seems that it has not been given special attention. This paper shows that the unit-Rayleigh distribution is much more interesting than it might at first glance, revealing closed-form expressions of important functions, and new desirable properties for application purposes. More precisely, on the theoretical level, we contribute to the following aspects: (i) we bring new characteristics on the form analysis of its main probabilistic and reliability functions, and show that the possible mode has a simple analytical expression, (ii) we prove new stochastic ordering results, (iii) we expose closed-form expressions of the incomplete and probability weighted moments at the basis of various probability functions and measures, (iv) we investigate distributional properties of the order statistics, (v) we show that the reliability coefficient can have a simple ratio expression, (vi) we provide a tractable expansion for the Tsallis entropy and (vii) we propose some bivariate unit-Rayleigh distributions. On a practical level, we show that the maximum likelihood estimate has a quite simple closed-form. Three data sets are analyzed and adjusted, revealing that the unit-Rayleigh distribution can be a better alternative to standard one-parameter unit distributions, such as the one-parameter Kumaraswamy, Topp–Leone, one-parameter beta, power and transmuted distributions.