Bootstrapping General Empirical Measures

Abstract

It is proved that the bootstrapped central limit theorem for empirical processes indexed by a class of functions $\mathscr{F}$ and based on a probability measure $P$ holds a.s. if and only if $\mathscr{F} \in \mathrm{CLT}(P)$ and $\int F^2 dP < \infty$, where $F = \sup_{f \in \mathscr{F}}|f|$, and it holds in probability if and only if $\mathscr{F} \in \mathrm{CLT}(P)$. Thus, for a large class of statistics, no local uniformity of the CLT (about $P$) is needed for the bootstrap to work. Consistency of the bootstrap (the bootstrapped law of large numbers) is also characterized. (These results are proved under certain weak measurability assumptions on $\mathscr{F}$.)