Sec-G Class of Distributions: Properties and Applications

Although there are many continuous distributions in the literature, only a handful take advantage of the modeling power provided by trigonometric functions. To our knowledge, none of them are based on the so-called secant function, defined as the reciprocal of the cosine function. The secant function can go to large values whenever the cosine function goes to small values. The idea is to profit from this trigonometric property to modify well-known distribution tails and overall skewness features. With this in mind, in this paper, a new class of trigonometric distributions based on the secant function is introduced. It is called the Sec-G class. We discuss the main mathematical characteristics of this class, including series expansions of the corresponding cumulative distribution and probability density functions, as well as several probabilistic measures and functions. In particular, we present the moments, skewness, kurtosis, Lorenz, and Bonferroni curves, reliability coefficient, entropy measure, and order statistics. Throughout the study, emphasis is placed on the unique four-parameter continuous distribution of this class, defined with the Kumaraswamy-Weibull distribution as the baseline. The estimation of the model parameters is performed using the maximum likelihood method. We also carried out a numerical simulation study and present the results in graphic form. Three referenced datasets were analyzed, and it is proved that the proposed secant Kumaraswamy-Weibull model outperforms important competitors, including the Kumaraswamy-Weibull, Kumaraswamy-Weibull geometric, Kumaraswamy-Weibull Poisson, Kumaraswamy Burr XII, and Weibull models.