ANALYZING SIMULATION OUTPUT USING THE BOOTSTRAP METHOD

There are many situations in which parametric statistical techniques a re less than ideal for evaluating a simulated system. For most simulat ion output, one must rely heavily on the central limit theorem in orde r to apply parametric statistical techniques. The bootstrap statistic is a nonparametric sample-resample technique that makes no distributio nal assumptions and may be used for estimation and hypothesis testing. The authors propose the bootstrap as a valuable tool for the analysis of simulation output data since it can be used in situations in which either the distribution is not known or normal approximations are ina ppropriate. Furthermore, since bootstrapping is itself a simulation te chnique it is inherently satisfying as a tool for the analysis of simu lation output data. Illustrations are presented.