Confidence Intervals for Animal Resource Selection

Confidence Intervals for Animal Resource Selection

(Question posed and answer given on Research Gate)

What is the best method for determining the Confidence Interval of Animal Resource Selection datasets?

I am not sure what your data set looks like.
However, a very general method to get confidence intervals for any statistic of which the probability distribution is not available, is by bootstrapping.
This can be done using the freely available, high quality R statistical package.
Regards.
Herman

And on Mohammad's further question after bootstrapping using the statistical package R:

Dear Mohammad,

There is a package called boot which you have to load.

Note that using R is not straightforward, but it has excellent online documentation.

So if you are not familiar with it, you have to take some time to familiarize.

As to the boot package, as a result you get several confidence intervals.

The preferred one is BCa (bias corrected and accelerated), but it not always

converges. You have to take a look and pick another one.

The package is based on Efron and Tibshirani's book:

Introduction to the bootstrap (1993).

Furthermore, if you have SPSS available: it has provisions

for bootstrapping also nowadays.

They may be less general than provisions offered

in R which allows to program a function that calculates

the statistic you want to bootstrap.

There is also the book by myself, Don Mellenbergh and David Hand:

`Advising on research methods: A consultant's companion' (2008)

which gives a concise but clear discussion of the bootstrap.

It has also been indexed for Google Books, so that you

can consult it online. See: www.jvank.nl/ARMHome

Best,

Herman