bootstrapping In phylogenetics, a statistical procedure for testing the robustness of a particular tree topology. Columns are randomly selected from an alignment in order to construct a new alignment from which a new tree is calculated, and the process is repeated 100–1000 times. A bootstrap score is then assigned to each branch of the original tree. This score is equal to the number of randomly-generated trees containing that branch.

bootstrapping In statistics, an approach to estimating the robustness or degree of error of a statistic when the distribution from which the statistic is drawn is unknown. An estimate of the distribution is constructed based on the data of the sample being analysed, often by repeatedly random sampling from the data itself and recalculating the statistic in order to produce a statistic distribution.