Bootstrap Simulation — Empirical Resampling for Statistical Inference

Bootstrap simulation, introduced by Bradley Efron in 1979, is a simulation-based inference method that derives the sampling distribution of virtually any statistic by repeatedly resampling with replacement from the observed data. Because it requires no parametric distributional assumptions, it provides a robust, general-purpose alternative to analytical confidence intervals and parametric hypothesis tests across continuous, ordinal, binary, and count data.