Abstract
A new distribution called the beta generalized exponential distribution is proposed. It includes the beta exponential and generalized exponential (GE) distributions as special cases. We provide a comprehensive mathematical treatment of this distribution. The density function can be expressed as a mixture of generalized exponential densities. This is important to obtain some mathematical properties of the new distribution in terms of the corresponding properties of the GE distribution. We derive the moment generating function (mgf) and the moments, thus generalizing some results in the literature. Expressions for the density, mgf and moments of the order statistics are also obtained. We discuss estimation of the parameters by maximum likelihood and obtain the information matrix that is easily numerically determined. We observe in one application to a real skewed data set that this model is quite flexible and can be used effectively in analyzing positive data in place of the beta exponential and GE distributions.