Leveraging the group structure of hypotheses for more powerful multiple testing with FDR control for the filtered rejection set

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Bogomolov, Marina, Nandi, Shinjini
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866911163323777024
author Bogomolov, Marina
Nandi, Shinjini
author_facet Bogomolov, Marina
Nandi, Shinjini
contents Modern biological studies often involve testing many hypotheses organized in a group or a hierarchical structure, such as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). In these studies, researchers often wish to control the false discovery rate (FDR) after filtering the discoveries to obtain interpretable results. For addressing this goal, Katsevich, Sabatti, and Bogomolov (2023, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 118(541), 165-176) developed a general method, Focused BH, that guarantees FDR control for the filtered rejection set for a pre-specified filter, under certain assumptions. We propose improving the power of Focused BH by adapting it to group or hierarchical structures of hypotheses using data-dependent weights. The general method incorporating such weights is referred to as Weighted Focused BH (WFBH). For DAG-structured hypotheses, we propose a variant of WFBH, which can gain power by being adaptive to the DAG structure, and by exploiting the logical relationships among the hypotheses. We prove that WFBH with weights that were proposed to adapt the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure to different group structures, as well as its proposed variant for testing DAG-structured hypotheses, control the post-filtering FDR under certain assumptions. Through simulations, we demonstrate that the latter variant is robust to deviations from these assumptions and can be considerably more powerful than comparable methods. Finally, we elucidate its practical use by applying it to real datasets from microbiome and gene expression studies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_15444
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Leveraging the group structure of hypotheses for more powerful multiple testing with FDR control for the filtered rejection set
Bogomolov, Marina
Nandi, Shinjini
Methodology
Statistics Theory
Modern biological studies often involve testing many hypotheses organized in a group or a hierarchical structure, such as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). In these studies, researchers often wish to control the false discovery rate (FDR) after filtering the discoveries to obtain interpretable results. For addressing this goal, Katsevich, Sabatti, and Bogomolov (2023, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 118(541), 165-176) developed a general method, Focused BH, that guarantees FDR control for the filtered rejection set for a pre-specified filter, under certain assumptions. We propose improving the power of Focused BH by adapting it to group or hierarchical structures of hypotheses using data-dependent weights. The general method incorporating such weights is referred to as Weighted Focused BH (WFBH). For DAG-structured hypotheses, we propose a variant of WFBH, which can gain power by being adaptive to the DAG structure, and by exploiting the logical relationships among the hypotheses. We prove that WFBH with weights that were proposed to adapt the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure to different group structures, as well as its proposed variant for testing DAG-structured hypotheses, control the post-filtering FDR under certain assumptions. Through simulations, we demonstrate that the latter variant is robust to deviations from these assumptions and can be considerably more powerful than comparable methods. Finally, we elucidate its practical use by applying it to real datasets from microbiome and gene expression studies.
title Leveraging the group structure of hypotheses for more powerful multiple testing with FDR control for the filtered rejection set
topic Methodology
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15444