Benjamini and Hochberg suggest that the false discovery rate may be the appropriate error rate to control in many applied multiple testing problems. A simple procedure was given there as an FDR controlling procedure for independent test statistics and was shown to be much more powerful than comparable procedures which control the traditional familywise error rate. We prove that this same procedure also controls the false discovery rate when the test statistics have positive regression dependency on each of the test statistics corresponding to the true null hypotheses. This condition for positive dependency is general enough to cover many problems of practical interest, including the comparisons of many treatments with a single control, multivariate normal test statistics with positive correlation matrix and multivariate t. Furthermore, the test statistics may be discrete, and the tested hypotheses composite without posing special difficulties. For all other forms of dependency, a simple conservative modification of the procedure controls the false discovery rate. Thus the range of problems for which

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Finding the sparsest solution to underdetermined systems of linear equations y = Φx is NP-hard in general. We show here that for systems with ‘typical’/‘random ’ Φ, a good approximation to the sparsest solution is obtained by applying a fixed number of standard operations from linear algebra. Our proposal, Stagewise Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (StOMP), successively transforms the signal into a negligible residual. Starting with initial residual r0 = y, at the s-th stage it forms the ‘matched filter ’ Φ T rs−1, identifies all coordinates with amplitudes exceeding a specially-chosen threshold, solves a least-squares problem using the selected coordinates, and subtracts the leastsquares fit, producing a new residual. After a fixed number of stages (e.g. 10), it stops. In contrast to Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), many coefficients can enter the model at each stage in StOMP while only one enters per stage in OMP; and StOMP takes a fixed number of stages (e.g. 10), while OMP can take many (e.g. n). StOMP runs much faster than competing proposals for sparse solutions, such as ℓ1 minimization and OMP, and so is attractive for solving large-scale problems. We use phase diagrams to compare algorithm performance. The problem of recovering a k-sparse vector x0 from (y, Φ) where Φ is random n × N and y = Φx0 is represented by a point (n/N, k/n)

Current scientific techniques in genomics and image processing routinely produce hypothesis testing problems with hundreds or thousands of cases to consider simultaneously. This poses new difficulties for the statistician, but also opens new opportunities. In particular it allows empirical estimation of an appropriate null hypothesis. The empirical null may be considerably more dispersed than the usual theoretical null distribution that would be used for any one case considered separately. An empirical Bayes analysis plan for this situation is developed, using a local version of the false discovery rate to examine the inference issues. Two genomics problems are used as examples to show the importance of correctly choosing the null hypothesis. Key Words: local false discovery rate, empirical Bayes, microarray analysis, empirical null hypothesis, unobserved covariates

Multiple hypothesis testing is concerned with controlling the rate of false positives when testing several hypotheses simultaneously. One multiple hypothesis testing error measure is the false discovery rate (FDR), which is loosely defined to be the expected proportion of false positives among all significant hypotheses. The FDR is especially appropriate for exploratory analyses in which one is interested in finding several significant results among many tests. In this work, we introduce a modified version of the FDR called the “positive false discovery rate ” (pFDR). We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the pFDR and investigate its statistical properties. When assuming the test statistics follow a mixture distribution, we show that the pFDR can be written as a Bayesian posterior probability and can be connected to classification theory. These properties remain asymptotically true under fairly general conditions, even under certain forms of dependence. Also, a new quantity called the “q-value ” is introduced and investigated, which is a natural “Bayesian posterior p-value, ” or rather the pFDR analogue of the p-value.

Finding objective and effective thresholds for voxelwise statistics derived from neuroimaging data has been a long-standing problem. With at least one test performed for every voxel in an image, some correction of the thresholds is needed to control the error rates, but standard procedures for multiple hypothesis testing (e.g., Bonferroni) tend to not be sensitive enough to be useful in this context. This paper introduces to the neuroscience literature statistical procedures for controlling the false discovery rate (FDR). Recent theoretical work in statistics suggests that FDR-controlling procedures will be effective for the analysis of neuroimaging data. These procedures operate simultaneously on all voxelwise test statistics to determine which tests should be considered statistically significant. The innovation of the procedures is that they control the expected proportion of the rejected hypotheses that are falsely rejected. We demonstrate this approach using both simulations and functional magnetic resonance imaging data from two

In a classic two-sample problem one might use Wilcoxon's statistic to test for a dierence between Treatment and Control subjects. The analogous microarray experiment yields thousands of Wilcoxon statistics, one for each gene on the array, and confronts the statistician with a dicult simultaneous inference situation. We will discuss two inferential approaches to this problem: an empirical Bayes method that requires very little a priori Bayesian modeling, and the frequentist method of \False Discovery Rates" proposed by Benjamini and Hochberg in 1995. It turns out that the two methods are closely related and can be used together to produce sensible simultaneous inferences.

this paper, is that with F =2logp. This choice was proposed by Foster &G eorge (1994) where it was called the Risk Inflation Criterion (RIC) because it asymptotically minimises the maximum predictive risk inflation due to selection when X is orthogonal. This choice and its minimax property were also discovered independently by Donoho & Johnstone (1994) in the wavelet regression context, where they refer to it as the universal hard thresholding rule

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We attempt to recover a high-dimensional vector observed in white noise, where the vector is known to be sparse, but the degree of sparsity is unknown. We consider three different ways of defining sparsity of a vector: using the fraction of nonzero terms; imposing power-law decay bounds on the ordered entries; and controlling the ℓp norm for p small. We obtain a procedure which is asymptotically minimax for ℓr loss, simultaneously throughout a range of such sparsity classes. The optimal procedure is a data-adaptive thresholding scheme, driven by control of the False Discovery Rate (FDR). FDR control is a recent innovation in simultaneous testing, in which one seeks to ensure that at most a certain fraction of the rejected null hypotheses will correspond to false rejections. In our treatment, the FDR control parameter q also plays a controlling role in asymptotic minimaxity. Our results say that letting q = qn → 0 with problem size n is sufficient for asymptotic minimaxity, while keeping fixed q>1/2prevents asymptotic minimaxity. To our knowledge, this relation between ideas in simultaneous inference and asymptotic decision theory is new. Our work provides a new perspective on a class of model selection rules which has been introduced recently by several authors. These new rules impose complexity penalization of the form 2·log ( potential model size / actual model size). We exhibit a close connection with FDR-controlling procedures having q tending to 0; this connection strongly supports a conjecture of simultaneous asymptotic minimaxity for such model selection rules.