Recent Developments in Bootstrap Methodology

Abstract

Ever since its introduction, the bootstrap has provided both a powerful set of solutions for practical statisticians, and a rich source of theoretical and methodological problems for statistics. In this article, some recent developments in bootstrap methodology are reviewed and discussed. After a brief introduction to the bootstrap, we consider the following topics at varying levels of detail: the use of bootstrapping for highly accurate parametric inference; theoretical properties of nonparametric bootstrapping with unequal probabilities; subsampling and the m out of n bootstrap; bootstrap failures and remedies for superefficient estimators; recent topics in significance testing; bootstrap improvements of unstable classifiers and resampling for dependent data. The treatment is telegraphic rather than exhaustive.