Abstract

. A class of weighted-bootstrap techniques, called biasedbootstrap methods, is proposed. It is motivated by the need to adjust more conventional, uniform-bootstrap methods in a surgical way, so as to alter some of their features while leaving others unchanged. Depending on the nature of the adjustment, the biased bootstrap can be used to reduce bias, or reduce variance, or render some characteristic equal to a predetermined quantity. More specifically, applications of bootstrap methods include hypothesis testing, variance stabilisation, both density estimation and nonparametric regression under constraints, `robustification ' of general statistical procedures, sensitivity analysis, generalised method of moments, shrinkage, and many more. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary 62G09, Secondary 62G05 Keywords and Phrases: Bias reduction, empirical likelihood, hypothesis testing, local-linear smoothing, nonparametric curve estimation, variance stabilisation, weighted bootstrap 1...

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