For example, suppose you measure the decay of a radioactive source at fixed times t = 0,1,2,... and fit y = A e^{-kt}. The only randomness is small measurement error with, say, SD = 0.5. The bootstrap sees the huge spread in the y-values that comes from the deterministic decay curve itself, not from noise. It interprets that structural variation as sampling variability and you end up with absurdly wide bootstrap confidence intervals that have nothing to do with the actual uncertainty in the experiment.
Maybe a residuals plot and IID tests of residuals (i.e. tests of some of the strong assumptions!) would be a better next step for the author than error estimates, but I stand by my original feedback. Right now even the simplest case of a straight line fit is reported with only exact slope & intercept (well, not exact, but to an almost surely meaningless 16 decimals!), though I guess he thought to truncate the goodness of fit measures at ~4 digits.
okramcivokram•5h ago
okramcivokram•5h ago