Letter to the Editor

摘要

The recent paper by Zupan et al. [Zupan D, Srpcic J, Turk G. Characteristic value determination from small samples. Struct Safety 2007;29:268-78] computed the characteristic value for small samples arising from the normal, log-normal, Cumbel and the Weibull distributions. In the letter, we point out that many of the values reported in Zupan et al. (2007) are incorrect. A simple program is given for determining the characteristic value when its distribution is arbitrary. The program is written in R: a freely downloadable statistical software.