A New Solution to Gate-Keeping Problems in Multiple Hypothesis Testing

• Activity Number: 401 - Multiple Measures and Multiple Testing
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 1, 2017 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Biopharmaceutical Section
• Author(s): Huajiang Li* and Hong Zhou
• Companies: Avanir Pharmaceuticals and Arkansas State University
• Keywords: Multiple testing ; Gate Keeping ; Familywise error rate
  ; Covering principlete
  

Abstract

Various multiple testing procedures have been proposed built on the closure principle and the partitioning principle to strongly control the familywise error rate in the past three decades. The essence of these two principles is based on parameter space partitioning. In this talk, we propose a novel approach coined the covering principle from the perspective of rejection region coverage analysis in the sample space. The covering principle tackles the multiplicity issue by dividing the whole family of null hypotheses into a few overlapped subsets, for which either the closure principle or the partitioning principle can be utilized. We have proven that the covering principle can control the familywise error rate strongly. Under the frame work of the covering principle the well-known gate-keeping procedures are illustrated by examples as well as the real clinical applications.