A practical guide for medical statisticians

Since the early 1980s, a bewildering array of methods for constructing bootstrap con"dence intervals have been proposed. In this article, we address the following questions. First, when should bootstrap con"dence intervals be used. Secondly, which method should be chosen, and thirdly, how should it be implemented. In order to do this, we review the common algorithms for resampling and methods for constructing bootstrap con"dence intervals, together with some less well known ones, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. We then present a simulation study, a #ow chart for choosing an appropriate method and a survival analysis example. Copyright ( 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.