Fam. Verdonck et al., Determining environmental standards using bootstrapping, Bayesian and maximum likelihood techniques: a comparative study, ANALYT CHIM, 446(1-2), 2001, pp. 429-438
Environmental standards must be set in ways which give full recognition to
all sources of uncertainty and variability of the toxicity data used to der
ive these standards. Toxicity data such as NOECs form a variability distrib
ution describing species sensitivity distribution (SSD). In EU environmenta
l regulations the 5th-percentile of SSD is used to set the quality criteria
. In this paper, a comparison is made between the application of techniques
characterising uncertainty and variability (bootstrap, maximum likelihood
estimation (MLE) and Bayesian approaches) using small toxicity data sets to
calculate the 5th-percentile. Estimating lower and upper uncertainty bound
s of a specific percentile gives different results when different methods a
re used. Bayesian and MLE methods were found to be superior to parametric b
ootstrapping because they are easier to use and not so computationally inte
nsive. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.