Wood property relationships and survival models in reliability

We study the relationship between lumber strength properties and their visual grading characteristics. This topic is central to the analysis of the reliability of lumber products in that it underlies the calculation of structural design values. The approaches described in the paper are adaptations of survival analysis methods commonly used in medical studies. Because each piece of lumber can only be tested to destruction with one method (i.e., each piece cannot be broken twice), modeling these strengths distributions simultaneously can be challenging. In the past, this kind of problem has been solved by subjectively matching pieces of lumber, but the quality of this approach is then an issue. The objective of our analysis is to build a predictive model that relates the strength properties to the recorded characteristics. The paper concludes that type of wood defect (knot), a lumber grade status (off‐grade: yes/no), and a lumber's module of elasticity have statistically significant effects on wood strength. We find that the Weibull accelerated failure time model provides a better fit than the Cox proportional hazards model in our dataset. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.