Adapting BH to One- and Two-Way Classified Structures of Hypotheses

TL;DR

This paper develops new procedures for controlling the false discovery rate in multiple hypothesis testing when hypotheses are classified in one- or two-way structures, extending the Benjamini-Hochberg method with weighted adaptations.

Contribution

It introduces novel oracle and data-adaptive procedures tailored for one- and two-way classified hypotheses, enhancing FDR control and power over existing methods.

Findings

Procedures effectively control FDR under dependence and independence assumptions.

Simulations and real data demonstrate improved power over existing methods.

New two-way classification procedures outperform prior approaches.

Abstract

Multiple testing literature contains ample research on controlling false discoveries for hypotheses classified according to one criterion, which we refer to as one-way classified hypotheses. Although simultaneous classification of hypotheses according to two different criteria, resulting in two-way classified hypotheses, do often occur in scientific studies, no such research has taken place yet, as far as we know, under this structure. This article produces procedures, both in their oracle and data-adaptive forms, for controlling the overall false discovery rate (FDR) across all hypotheses effectively capturing the underlying one- or two-way classification structure. They have been obtained by using results associated with weighted Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) procedure in their more general forms providing guidance on how to adapt the original BH procedure to the underlying one- or two-way classification structure through an appropriate choice of the weights. The FDR is maintained non-asymptotically by our proposed procedures in their oracle forms under positive regression dependence on subset of null $p$-values (PRDS) and in their data-adaptive forms under independence of the $p$-values. Possible control of FDR for our data-adaptive procedures in certain scenarios involving dependent $p$-values have been investigated through simulations. The fact that our suggested procedures can be superior to contemporary practices has been demonstrated through their applications in simulated scenarios and to real-life data sets. While the procedures proposed here for two-way classified hypotheses are new, the data-adaptive procedure obtained for one-way classified hypotheses is alternative to and often more powerful than those proposed in Hu et al. (2010).