Abstract

In this paper, we formulate a very flexible family of models which unifies most recent lifetime distributions. The main idea is to obtain a cumulative distribution function to transform the baseline distribution with an activation mechanism characterized by a latent threshold variable. The new family has a strong biological interpretation from the competitive risks point of view and the Box-Cox transformation provides an elegant manner to interpret the effect on the baseline distribution to obtain this alternative model. Several structural properties of the new model are investigated. A Bayesian analysis using Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedure is developed to illustrate with a real data the usefulness of the proposed family.