# Wilcoxon test in boot() function

I'm trying out the boot() function for internal validation of a logistic glm model using the AUC (aka c-statistic) as my performance measure. My problem is that depending on the dataset I use, sometimes the function gets "50 or more warnings," all of which are of this type:

Warning messages:
1: In wilcox.test.default(pred[obs == 1], pred[obs == 0],  ... :
cannot compute exact p-value with ties


Even though the function produces these warnings, it does also produce the relevant bootstrap statistics.

I'm not sure what to make of this situation since I don't even know in what context boot() is calling wilcox.test. The documentation ?boot doesn't mention the use of the Wilcoxon test.

Here is an example that generates these warnings:

data(nuclear)
library(verification)

AUC = function(data, i) {
d = data[i,]
rs1 = glm(ne ~ cost, family=binomial(link="logit"), data=d)
return(roc.area(d$ne, predict(rs1))$A)
}

library(boot)
boot(data=nuclear, statistic=AUC, R=600)


And an example that doesn't:

data(melanoma)

AUC = function(data, i) {
d = data[i,]
rs1 = glm(ulcer ~ thickness, family=binomial(link="logit"), data=d)
return(roc.area(d$ulcer, predict(rs1))$A)
}

boot(data=melanoma, statistic=AUC, R=600)


(I apologize if this question belongs in Stack Overflow instead of here -- not sure how statistical vs. programmatic the issue is.)

This is not boot that is calling the Wilcoxon test, but verification::roc.area which can be checked by looking at the on-line help:
(or directly by looking at the source code, e.g. verification:::roc.area.)
As you are using bootstrap with replacement, we know that about one third of the sample will not be used in each run, and so you naturally introduce ties and ranks will not be unique anymore, which is what wilcox.test complains about. This function will return an approximate $p$-value (using asymptotic normal distribution).