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The Bootstrap

Peter Ralph

15 October – Advanced Biological Statistics

Estimating sampling error

Standard error

From a single set of numbers

\[ x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n \]

we can get both a mean:

\[ \bar x = \frac{1}{n} \sum_{i=1}^n x_i \]

and an estimate of the variability of the mean, the standard error:

\[ \frac{s}{\sqrt{n}} = \sqrt{\frac{1}{n(n-1)}\sum_{i=1}^n \left(x_i - \bar x\right)^2 } .\]

This is amazing!

Sadly, it’s not so easy to simply compute a standard error for most estimates.

What to do?

Enter the bootstrap

Idea:

  • We’d like to get a whole new dataset, and repeat the estimation, to see how different the answer is.

  • And, well, our best guess at what the data look like is our dataset itself,

  • sooooo, let’s just resample from the dataset, with replacement, to make a “new” dataset!

  • If we resample and re-estimate lots of times, this should give us a good idea of the variability of the estimate.

The bootstrap resampling algorithm

To estimate the uncertainty of an estimate:

  1. Use the computer to take a random sample of observations from the original data, with replacement.

  2. Calculate the estimate from the resampled data set.

  3. Repeat 1-2 many times.

  4. The standard deviation of these esimates is the bootstrap standard error.

Advantages

  • Applies to most any statistic

  • Works when there’s no simple formula for the standard error (e.g., median, trimmed mean, eigenvalue, etc)

  • Is nonparametric, so doesn’t make specific assumptions about the distribution of the data.

  • Applies to even complicated sampling procedures.

Exercise

x <- c(0.6, 1, 3.1, 3.7, 4.8, 6.2, 12.5, 12.5, 13.4, 24.1)

  • Use R to make 1000 “pseudo-samples” of size 10 (with replacement),

  • and store the mean of each in a vector.

  • Plot the histogram of the resampled means, and calculate their standard deviation (with sd()).

  • How does this compare to the usual standard error of the mean, sd(x) / sqrt(length(x))?

Confidence intervals?

The 2.5% and 97.5% percentiles of the bootstrap samples estimate a 95% confidence interval. (use the quantile( ) function)

Exercise: get a 95% CI and compare it to that given by t.test( ).

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