Abstract
It has been indicated that an estimate S of the standard deviation S obtained by the up-and-down method has some bias and the method for determining the confidence interval of S through the Fisher's amount of information is inaccurate. This paper shows that the bias of S can be corrected by using the bias corrected bootstrap method and that an accurate confidence interval of S can be obtained. For easy understanding, a detail explanation of the method for determining the confidence interval is shown in this paper by a concrete example of the up-and-down method. This is an introduction for the practitioners. This method was proved correct by the Monte Carlo simulation.
The up-and-down method is still popular as a testing method for determining the impulsebreakdown voltage. This method is particularly effective when the estimate of the standard deviation S of the breakdown voltage is larger than the up-and-down voltage distance d (i. e, when d/S is small).
