When Using Maximum Likelihood

When using maximum likelihood methods, each individual time is explicitly used in the calculation of the parameters, thus there is no difference in the entry of a group of 10 units failing at 100 hours and 10 individual entries of 100 hours. This is inherent in the standard MLE method. In other words, no matter how the data were entered (i.e. as grouped or non-grouped) the results will be identical. When using maximum likelihood, we highly recommend entering redundant data in groups, as this significantly speeds up the calculations.