Covariate powered cross-weighted multiple testing

N Ignatiadis, W Huber - Journal of the Royal Statistical Society …, 2021 - academic.oup.com
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical …, 2021academic.oup.com
A fundamental task in the analysis of data sets with many variables is screening for
associations. This can be cast as a multiple testing task, where the objective is achieving
high detection power while controlling type I error. We consider m hypothesis tests
represented by pairs ((P i, X i)) 1≤ i≤ m of p-values P i and covariates X i, such that P i⊥ X i
if H i is null. Here, we show how to use information potentially available in the covariates
about heterogeneities among hypotheses to increase power compared to conventional …
Abstract
A fundamental task in the analysis of data sets with many variables is screening for associations. This can be cast as a multiple testing task, where the objective is achieving high detection power while controlling type I error. We consider m hypothesis tests represented by pairs of p-values and covariates , such that if is null. Here, we show how to use information potentially available in the covariates about heterogeneities among hypotheses to increase power compared to conventional procedures that only use the . To this end, we upgrade existing weighted multiple testing procedures through the independent hypothesis weighting (IHW) framework to use data-driven weights that are calculated as a function of the covariates. Finite sample guarantees, for example false discovery rate control, are derived from cross-weighting, a data-splitting approach that enables learning the weight-covariate function without overfitting as long as the hypotheses can be partitioned into independent folds, with arbitrary within-fold dependence. IHW has increased power compared to methods that do not use covariate information. A key implication of IHW is that hypothesis rejection in common multiple testing setups should not proceed according to the ranking of the p-values, but by an alternative ranking implied by the covariate-weighted p-values.
Oxford University Press