The History of Bootstrapping: Tracing the Development of Resampling with Replacement

Sampling is one of the most fundamental concepts in statistics, as the quality and accuracy of the statistical inferences made, heavily depend on the method used to obtain the sample and the sample’s ability to represent the population of inference. Despite being a simple concept, sampling presents researchers with many challenges. Generally, due to monetary and time constraints, researchers must take a smaller sample size than they would ideally use. Using statistics from these small samples, estimates for population parameters can be made, typically in the form of a confidence interval. However, the validity of these confidence intervals depends on three basic assumptions that are difficult to meet with small sample sizes. This paper traces the development of the sampling method known as bootstrapping that helps small samples to meet these assumptions. The paper touches on previous methods used before the development of bootstrapping and shows how bootstrapping has evolved over the last four decades and become widely used in the field of statistics.