Estimating the number of faults: Efficiency of removal recapture, and seeding

Abstract

Summary & Conclusions -Various experimental designs for estimating the number of faults in a system are studied including; i. removal of each fault as it is detected, ii. marking of each fault as it is detected, iii. introduction of a known number of faults into the system followed by #i or #ii. A unified framework is developed for comparing these designs; it also produces simplified estimators having high efficiency relative to maximum likelihood estimators. The designs are compared in terms of • statistical accuracy, • the number of failures that need to occur to achieve a given accuracy. On the, basis of these comparisons, some general recommendations are made on the level of seeding as w..