Best Linear Unbiased Prediction of Order Statistics in Location and Scale Families

In many life testing, reliability and replacement policy situations, it is desirable to predict the time of future failures from times of the early failures in the same sample. Interval prediction in this setting has been treated by several authors. In this article, the authors give best linear unbiased (blu) point predictors of future failures when the underlying distribution is known up to location and scale. Analogous large sample procedures based on sample quantile theory are provided. The results are illustrated for the exponential and Pareto distributions.