I am using the R package boot to bootstrap Harrel's C Index with different Cox models. My sample consists of about 700 cases with 90 events.
> boot.ci(boots[[2]], type="bca") BOOTSTRAP CONFIDENCE INTERVAL CALCULATIONS Based on 10000 bootstrap replicates CALL : boot.ci(boot.out = boots[[2]], type = "bca") Intervals : Level BCa 95% ( 0.7354, 0.7376 ) Calculations and Intervals on Original Scale Warning : BCa Intervals used Extreme Quantiles Some BCa intervals may be unstable I understand that this warning is common when the number of replications is too low, but thought that 10000 would suffice. Can I expect to not get this kind of problem when I further raise the number of replications, or is something different wrong that more replications won't fix?
Best Answer
The message is generated when intervals use the upper or lower 10 order statistics. The following code reveals the indices of the order statistics used in the calculations:
boot.ci(boots[[2]], type="bca")$bca[2:3] If the first is less than or equal to 10 or the second is greater than or equal to R – 9, then the message is triggered. In your case, R = 10,000.
You can verify this by looking at the code for print.bootci:
getAnywhere(print.bootci) Near the bottom you'll see:
if ((bcarg[1L] <= 10) || (bcarg[2L] >= R - 9)) cat("Some BCa intervals may be unstablen") bcarg is defined higher up in the function and consists of the indices of the order statistics.
One way to get rid of the message is to decrease the confidence level from the default of 0.95 to, say, 0.90.
boot.ci(boots[[2]], type="bca", conf=0.90) Similar Posts:
- Solved – how can I calculate confidence interval with small sample in R
- Solved – using bootstrap to calculate t-test p-value and CI in r
- Solved – Bootstrap confidence intervals – how many replications to choose
- Solved – Computing confidence intervals for count data
- Solved – Significance of difference between 2 variables of Cauchy distribution