ON A CHARACTERIZATION OF THE EXPONENTIAL-DISTRIBUTION BASED ON A TYPE-2 RIGHT CENSORED SAMPLE

Dufour gives a conjecture concerning a characterization of the exponen tial distribution based on type 2 right censored samples. This conject ure, if true, generalizes the characterization based on complete sampl es of Seshadri, Csorgo and Stephens (1969) and Dufour, Maag and van Ee den (1984). In this paper it is shown that Dufour's conjecture is true if the number of censored observations is no larger than (1/3)n - 1, where n is the sample size. The result has implications for testing fi t of censored data to the exponential distribution.