The risk priority index for the left-censored melamine data

The melamine incident had drawn worldwide attentions concerning food safety issues. tests on chemical detection often involve data below limit of detection (lod) which is called the left-censored data. by combining turnbull estimator for left-censored data under log-normal distribution and the proposed risk priority index which is similar to the sharpe ratio in portfolio management,a risk priority algorithm is proposed in this article to screen out food product categories with higher risk for enhancing food surveillance. the test results on melamine collected from the website of the centre for food safety of hong kong are empirically analyzed by the proposed algorithm,the risk priority indices for various food categories are discussed in details which are helpful for the future food surveillance plan. © 2012 pakistan journal of statistics.