Smoothed Bootstrap Methods for Hypothesis Testing

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the application of smoothed bootstrap methods and Efron’s methods for hypothesis testing on real-valued data, right-censored data and bivariate data. The tests include quartile hypothesis tests, two sample medians and Pearson and Kendall correlation tests. Simulation studies indicate that the smoothed bootstrap methods outperform Efron’s methods in most scenarios, particularly for small datasets. The smoothed bootstrap methods provide smaller discrepancies between the actual and nominal error rates, which makes them more reliable for testing hypotheses.