Validating sample statistics with bootstrapping

When working with sampled data, we need to produce descriptive statistics. We want to know how accurate our estimates are, which is known as standard error of the estimate.

Bootstrapping is a way to estimate the standard errors of the estimate when we can't directly observe the data. Bootstrapping works by repeatedly taking samples of the chosen sample, allowing items to be included in the secondary sample multiple times. Doing this over and over allows us to estimate the standard error.

We can use bootstrapping when the sample we're working with is small, or when we don't know the distribution of the sample's population.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we'll use these dependencies in out project.clj file:

(defproject statim "0.1.0"
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.6.0"]
                 [incanter "1.5.5"]])

We'll also use these namespaces in our script or REPL:

(require
  '[incanter.core :as i]
  '[incanter.stats :as s]
  'incanter.io
  ...