Hierarchical Testing of Subsets of Hypotheses

• Activity Number: 57
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Sunday, July 31, 2011 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: IMS
• Author(s): Yoav Benjamini*+
• Companies: Tel Aviv University

Abstract

As the size of large testing problems encountered in genomic research keeps increasing, more of these problems have further structure where the family of hypotheses can be partitioned into subsets of the hypotheses, e.g. as defined by pathways, and the true state of the tested signals tends to be more similar within these subsets than across the subsets. Moreover, interest may lie with a discovery of a subset with some signal in it, on top of the discovery of a signal in each of the many hypotheses on its own.The challenges in the analysis of such multiple testing problems will be discussed. We then present a few new methods to control various aspects of the False Discovery Rate, and address their benefits and limitations using the genomic part of a Norwegian epidemiological study of breast cancer.