An online generalization of the (e-)Benjamini-Hochberg procedure

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fischer, Lasse, Xu, Ziyu, Ramdas, Aaditya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Fischer, Lasse
Xu, Ziyu
Ramdas, Aaditya
author_facet Fischer, Lasse
Xu, Ziyu
Ramdas, Aaditya
contents In online multiple testing, the hypotheses arrive one by one, and at each time we must immediately reject or accept the current hypothesis solely based on the data and hypotheses observed so far. Many online procedures have been proposed, but none of them are generalizations of the Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) procedure based on p-values, or of the e-BH procedure that uses e-values. In this paper, we consider a relaxed problem setup that allows the current hypothesis to be rejected at any later step. We show that this relaxation allows us to define -- what we justify extensively to be -- the natural and appropriate online extension of the BH and e-BH procedures. We show that the FDR guarantees for BH (resp. e-BH) and online BH (resp. online e-BH) are identical under positive, negative or arbitrary dependence, at fixed and stopping times. Further, the online BH (resp. online e-BH) rule recovers the BH (resp. e-BH) rule as a special case when the number of hypotheses is known to be fixed. Of independent interest, our proof techniques also allow us to prove that numerous existing online procedures, which were known to control the FDR at fixed times, also control the FDR at stopping times.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_20683
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An online generalization of the (e-)Benjamini-Hochberg procedure
Fischer, Lasse
Xu, Ziyu
Ramdas, Aaditya
Methodology
In online multiple testing, the hypotheses arrive one by one, and at each time we must immediately reject or accept the current hypothesis solely based on the data and hypotheses observed so far. Many online procedures have been proposed, but none of them are generalizations of the Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) procedure based on p-values, or of the e-BH procedure that uses e-values. In this paper, we consider a relaxed problem setup that allows the current hypothesis to be rejected at any later step. We show that this relaxation allows us to define -- what we justify extensively to be -- the natural and appropriate online extension of the BH and e-BH procedures. We show that the FDR guarantees for BH (resp. e-BH) and online BH (resp. online e-BH) are identical under positive, negative or arbitrary dependence, at fixed and stopping times. Further, the online BH (resp. online e-BH) rule recovers the BH (resp. e-BH) rule as a special case when the number of hypotheses is known to be fixed. Of independent interest, our proof techniques also allow us to prove that numerous existing online procedures, which were known to control the FDR at fixed times, also control the FDR at stopping times.
title An online generalization of the (e-)Benjamini-Hochberg procedure
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.20683