Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new family of the quadratic hazard rate distribution. This new family has the advantage of being capable of modeling various shapes of aging and failure criteria. Furthermore, some well-known lifetime distributions such as generalized exponential distribution, generalized linear hazard rate distribution, and generalized Rayleigh distribution among others follow as special cases. Some statistical and reliability properties of the new family are discussed and the maximum likelihood estimation is used to estimate the unknown parameters. Explicit expressions are derived for the quantiles. In addition, the asymptotic confidence intervals for the parameters are derived from the Fisher information matrix. Finally, the obtained results are validated using a real data set and it is shown that the new family provides a better fit than some other known distributions.