A new method to determine the number of experimental data using statistical modeling methods

For analyzing the statistical performance of physical systems, statistical characteristics of physical parameters such as material properties need to be estimated by collecting experimental data. For accurate statistical modeling, many such experiments may be required, but data are usually quite limited owing to the cost and time constraints of experiments. In this study, a new method for determining a rea- sonable number of experimental data is proposed using an area metric, after obtaining statistical models using the information on the underlying distribution, the Sequential statistical modeling (SSM) approach, and the Kernel density estimation (KDE) approach. The area metric is used as a convergence criterion to determine the necessary and sufficient number of experimental data to be acquired. The pro- posed method is validated in simulations, using different statistical modeling methods, different true models, and different convergence criteria. An example data set with 29 data describing the fatigue strength coefficient of SAE 950X is used for demonstrating the performance of the obtained statistical models that use a pre-determined number of experimental data in predicting the probability of failure for a target fatigue life.