Online FDR Controlling procedures for statistical SIS Model and its application to COVID19 data

TL;DR

This paper introduces an online FDR control method tailored for infectious disease data, leveraging conditional local FDR to improve detection power and control in dependent, discrete datasets, with applications to COVID-19 modeling.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel online FDR controlling procedure based on conditional local FDR, applicable to dependent and discrete datasets, with a practical implementation for real-time epidemic monitoring.

Findings

Effectively controls FDR in dependent infectious disease data

Achieves higher detection power than existing methods

Validated through simulations and COVID-19 data analysis

Abstract

We propose an online false discovery rate (FDR) controlling method based on conditional local FDR (LIS), designed for infectious disease datasets that are discrete and exhibit complex dependencies. Unlike existing online FDR methods, which often assume independence or suffer from low statistical power in dependent settings, our approach effectively controls FDR while maintaining high detection power in realistic epidemic scenarios. For disease modeling, we establish a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) structure within the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model, a widely used epidemiological framework for infectious diseases. Our method requires no additional tuning parameters apart from the width of the sliding window, making it practical for real-time disease monitoring. From a statistical perspective, we prove that our method ensures valid FDR control under stationary and ergodic dependencies, extending online hypothesis testing to a broader range of dependent and discrete datasets. Additionally, our method achieves higher statistical power than existing approaches by leveraging LIS, which has been shown to be more powerful than traditional $p$-value-based methods. We validate our method through extensive simulations and real-world applications, including the analysis of infectious disease incidence data. Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms existing methods by achieving higher detection power while maintaining rigorous FDR control.