False discovery rate controlling procedures for discrete tests

2011/12/20 by Ruth Heller, Heller, Ruth, Hadas Gur +1
Immunology and Microbiology · Mathematics · Social Sciences · #Academic integrity and plagiarism #Biosimilars and Bioanalytical Methods #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Methodology (stat.ME) #Statistical Methods in Clinical Trials

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1112.4627

openalex publication_date 2011/12/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Benjamini and Hochberg (1995) proposed the false discovery rate (FDR) as an alternative to the family-wise error rate in multiple testing problems, and proposed a procedure to control the FDR. For discrete data this procedure may be highly conservative. We investigate alternative, more powerful, procedures that exploit the discreteness of the tests and have FDR levels closer in magnitude to the desired nominal level. Moreover, we develop a novel step-down procedure that dominates the step-down procedure of Benjamini and Liu (1999) for discrete data. We consider an application to pharmacovigilance spontaneous reporting systems, that serve for early detection of adverse reactions of marketed drugs.

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