Abstract: The shortcoming of determining failure distribution in intuition is pointed out,and an idea of quantitating similarity between theoretic curve and testing curve to determine the failure distribution of samples is presented,which is based on analyzing the traditional leaf-figure method.Furthermore,the correlation coefficient method is considered to quantitate similarity between two curves.At the same time,the importance of smoothing data is analyzed.Then,the correlation coefficient between smoothing data and theoretic data is firstly used to determine the failure distribution of samples,which is based on extracting an outline of testing data by means of wavelet transformation.The experiment result shows that the correlation coefficient method based on smoothed data could distinguish the shape difference between two curves,and offers a quantitative standard for determining the distribution of failure data.In sum,the presented method is a further supplement to the previous leaf-figure method.