What Teachers Should Know About the Bootstrap: Resampling in the Undergraduate Statistics Curriculum

Abstract

I have three goals in this article: (1) To show the enormous potential of bootstrapping and permutation tests to help students understand statistical concepts including sampling distributions, standard errors, bias, confidence intervals, null distributions, and P-values. (2) To dig deeper, understand why these methods work and when they don't, things to watch out for, and how to deal with these issues when teaching. (3) To change statistical practice---by comparing these methods to common t tests and intervals, we see how inaccurate the latter are; we confirm this with asymptotics. n >= 30 isn't enough---think n >= 5000. Resampling provides diagnostics, and more accurate alternatives. Sadly, the common bootstrap percentile interval badly under-covers in small samples; there are better alternatives. The tone is informal, with a few stories and jokes.