A bootstrap recipe for post-model-selection inference under linear regression models

Abstract

We propose a general bootstrap recipe for estimating the distributions of post-model-selection least squares estimators under a linear regression model. The recipe constrains residual bootstrapping within the most parsimonious, approximately correct, models to yield a distribution estimator which is consistent provided any wrong candidate model is sufficiently separated from the approximately correct ones. Our theory applies to a broad class of model selection methods based on information criteria or sparse estimation. The empirical performance of our procedure is illustrated with simulated data.