A unified treatment of multiple testing with prior knowledge using the p-filter
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A significant literature studies ways of employing prior knowledge to improve power and precision of multiple testing procedures. Some common forms of prior knowledge may include (a) a priori beliefs about which hypotheses are null, modeled by non-uniform prior weights; (b) differing importances of hypotheses, modeled by differing penalties for false discoveries; (c) multiple arbitrary partitions of the hypotheses into known (possibly overlapping) groups, indicating (dis)similarity of hypotheses; and (d) knowledge of independence, positive or arbitrary dependence between hypotheses or groups, allowing for more aggressive or conservative procedures. We present a unified algorithmic framework called p-filter for global null testing and false discovery rate (FDR) control that allows the scientist to incorporate all four types of prior knowledge (a)-(d) simultaneously, recovering a wide variety of common algorithms as special cases.
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