In general factorial designs where no homoscedasticity or a particular error distribution is assumed, the well-known Wald-type statistic is a simple asymptotically valid procedure. However, it is well known that it suffers from a poor finite sample approximation since the convergence to its χ 2 limit distribution is quite slow. This becomes even worse with an increasing number of factor levels. The aim of the paper is to improve the small sample behaviour of the Wald-type statistic, maintaining its applicability to general settings as crossed or hierarchically nested designs by applying a modified permutation approach. In particular, it is shown that this approach approximates the null distribution of the Wald-type statistic not only under the null hypothesis but also under the alternative yielding an asymptotically valid permutation test which is even finitely exact under exchangeability. Finally, its small sample behaviour is compared with competing procedures in an extensive simulation study.

Abstract. Existing tests for factorial designs in the nonparametric case are based on hypotheses formulated in terms of distribution functions. Typical null hypotheses, however, are formulated in terms of some parameters or effect measures, particularly in heteroscedastic settings. Here this idea is extended to nonparametric models by introducing a novel nonparametric ANOVA-type-statistic based on ranks which is suitable for testing hypotheses formulated in meaningful nonparametric treatment effects in general factorial designs. This is achieved by a careful in-depth study of the common distribution of rank-based estimators for the treatment effects. Since the statistic is asymptotically not a pivotal quantity we propose three different approximation techniques, discuss their theoretic properties and compare them in extensive simulations together with two additional Wald-type tests. An extension of the presented idea to general repeated measures designs is briefly outlined. The proposed rank-based procedures maintain the pre-assigned type-I error rate quite accurately, also in unbalanced and heteroscedastic models.All authors are given in alphabetic order:

Nonparametric statistical inference methods for a modern and robust analysis of longitudinal and multivariate data in factorial experiments are essential for research. While existing approaches that rely on specific distributional assumptions of the data (multivariate normality and/or equal covariance matrices) are implemented in statistical software packages, there is a need for user-friendly software that can be used for the analysis of data that do not fulfill the aforementioned assumptions and provide accurate p value and confidence interval estimates. Therefore, newly developed nonparametric statistical methods based on bootstrap-and permutation-approaches, which neither assume multivariate normality nor specific covariance matrices, have been implemented in the freely available R package MANOVA.RM. The package is equipped with a graphical user interface for plausible applications in academia and other educational purpose. Several motivating examples illustrate the application of the methods.

a b s t r a c tWe develop parametric and nonparametric bootstrap methods for multi-factor multivariate data, without assuming normality, and allowing for covariance matrices that are heterogeneous between groups. The newly proposed, general procedure includes several situations as special cases, such as the multivariate Behrens-Fisher problem, the multivariate one-way layout, as well as crossed and hierarchically nested two-way layouts. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the bootstrap tests for general factorial designs and evaluate their performance in an extensive comparative simulation study. For moderate sample sizes, the bootstrap approach provides an improvement to existing methods in particular for situations with nonnormal data and heterogeneous covariance matrices in unbalanced designs. For balanced designs, less computationally intensive alternatives based on approximate sampling distributions of multivariate tests can be recommended.