THE BOOTSTRAP FOR MAGNETIC-SUSCEPTIBILITY TENSORS

In studies of the anisotropy of susceptibility or remanence of paleomagnetic samples it is conventional to specify the anisotropy in terms of the parameters of the anisotropy ellipsoids, namely the directions of the principal axes of the ellipsoid and their associated eigenvalues. Confidence intervals for these parameters have in the past often been estimated by using a linearization scheme to propagate the effect of small changes through the eigenvalue decomposition. The validity of these approximations is explored using a Monte-Carlo simulation from measurements that are presumed normally distributed. Because of shortcomings in the conventional technique we propose using a bootstrap resampling scheme to find empirically the distribution of uncertainties in the results. -from Authors