Application of discrete Burr XII distribution in the analysis of animal production data

In animal production, the models that mimicry the biological reality are of great importance for optimization and sustainability of the productive system. The continuous Burr XII distribution is widely used in survival data analysis, however, the same does not occur with its discrete version, recently proposed in the literature. The purpose of this work is to use the discrete Burr XII distribution, obtained by the discretization method proposed by Nakagawa and Osaki (1975), in the analysis of data related to animal production. The data analyzed describe the time, in days, from birth to first laying of yellow quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica) submitted to two diets. For this purpose the discretized versions of five distributions were used: the discrete Burr XII, the discrete Weibull, the discrete gamma, the discrete inverse-Gaussian and the discrete log-normal. For all distributions, the parameter estimates were obtained by the maximum likelihood method. Despite the similarity between the estimates it is natural to choose the discrete given the nature of the data and assuming the discrete distribution, it could be calculated exactly, for example, the probability of the time to the first posture, which is not possible if a continuous distribution is assumed. Thus, among the discrete distributions, the chi-square goodness-of-fit test showed that the Burr XII distribution was the only one indicated to describe the behavior of the data considered