A new test for testing exponentiality against increasing failure rate average alternatives

The problem of testing exponentiality against positive ageing has received much attention of the researchers. A particular type of positive aging, namely, increasing failure rate average (IFRA) is an important concept in the theory of reliability, which arise as life distributions from shock models. In this paper, a test procedure based on U-statistics is proposed for the problem of testing exponentiality against increasing failure rate average alternatives. The distributional properties of the test statistic are studied. The performance of the proposed test is compared with the tests existed in the literature in terms of Pitman asymptotic relative efficiency. It is observed that the proposed test performs better.