Estimating residual fault hitting rates by recapture sampling
For the recapture debugging design introduced by Nayak (1988) the problem of estimating the hitting rates of the faults remaining in the system is considered. In the context of a conditional likelihood, moment estimators are derived and are shown to be asymptotically normal and fully efficient. Fixed sample properties of the moment estimators are compared, through simulation, with those of the conditional maximum likelihood estimators. Properties of the conditional model are investigated such as the asymptotic distribution of linear functions of the fault hitting frequencies and a representation of the full data vector in terms of a sequence of independent random vectors. It is assumed that the residual hitting rates follow a log linear rate model and that the testing process is truncated when the gaps between the detection of new errors exceed a fixed amount of time.