TWO ESTIMATED SNOW LOAD CURVES AND THE BOOTSTRAP SIGNIFICANCE TEST

A new statistical hypothesis testing method is proposed for testing the equality of two curves. The overall difference between two curves is expressed as the difference of areas under the two curves. We adopt the area-difference as a test statistic whose sampling distribution is approximated by two kinds of bootstrap methods; resampling from the centered residuals and from the original paired data. Applying this method to several snow load datasets, we examine the validity of the snow load curve proposed by Matsushita and Izumi (1956) in architecture. This is done by comparing the curve with the one which is obtained by applying the least squares method to the logarithmic transformed data.