An Evaluation of Wheeler's Method for Monitoring the Rate of Rare Events

Its wide application in practice makes the monitoring of the rate of rare events a popular research topic. Recently a researcher proposed plotting the counts between events on an individuals X‐chart with an upper control limit to detect process improvement and plotting the reciprocals of the counts on an X‐chart to detect process deterioration. He also used the median as the center line and the median moving range to obtain control limits in both control charts to address the problem of the standard deviation estimate inflation caused by extreme values. In our paper, we investigated the statistical performance of the four proposed approaches using simulation. We find using the mean results in a high proportion of ineffective control limits, while using the median avoids the issue of ineffective control limits but produces an unacceptably high proportion of false alarms.