Records arise naturally in many fields of study such as climatology, sports, science, engineering, medicine, traffic, and industry, among others. An observation is called a record if its value is greater than (or analogously, less than) all the preceding observations. The exponential and Rayleigh distribution play pivotal roles in the study of records because of their wide applicability in the modeling and analysis of lifetime data. In this handbook, various properties of record values of univariate exponential and Rayleigh distributions, including most of the recent works, are reviewed. Some new results on mean residual life based on records and the minimum variance linear unbiased estimators of past records from univariate exponential distribution are presented.

Records arise naturally in many fields of study such as climatology, sports, science, engineering, medicine, traffic, and industry, among others. An observation is called a record if its value is greater than (or analogously, less than) all the preceding observations. The exponential and Rayleigh distribution play pivotal roles in the study of records because of their wide applicability in the modeling and analysis of lifetime data. In this handbook, various properties of record values of univariate exponential and Rayleigh distributions, including most of the recent works, are reviewed. Some new results on mean residual life based on records and the minimum variance linear unbiased estimators of past records from univariate exponential distribution are presented.