reading classics (#4)

Another read today and not from JRSS B for once, namely,  Efron‘s (an)other look at the Jackknife, i.e. the 1979 bootstrap classic published in the Annals of Statistics. My Master students in the Reading Classics Seminar course thus listened today to Marco Brandi’s presentation, whose (Beamer) slides are here:

In my opinion this was an easier paper to discuss, more because of its visible impact than because of the paper itself, where the comparison with the jackknife procedure does not sound so relevant nowadays. again mostly algorithmic and requiring some background on how it impacted the field. Even though Marco also went through Don Rubin’s Bayesian bootstrap and Michael Jordan bag of little bootstraps, he struggled to get away from the technicality towards the intuition and the relevance of the method. The Bayesian bootstrap extension was quite interesting in that we discussed a lot the connections with Dirichlet priors and the lack of parameters that sounded quite antagonistic with the Bayesian principles. However, at the end of the day, I feel that this foundational paper was not explored in proportion to its depth and that it would be worth another visit.