Statistical inference for start-up demonstration tests with rejection of units upon observing d failures

In this paper, we consider the statistical inference for the success probability in the case of start-up demonstration tests in which rejection of units is possible when a pre-fixed number of failures is observed before the required number of consecutive successes are achieved for acceptance of the unit. Since the expected value of the stopping time is not a monotone function of the unknown parameter, the method of moments is not useful in this situation. Therefore, we discuss two estimation methods for the success probability: (1) the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) via the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm and (2) Bayesian estimation with a beta prior. We examine the small-sample properties of the MLE and Bayesian estimator. Finally, we present an example to illustrate the method of inference discussed here.