Two simple sufficient conditions for FDR control

Abstract

We show that the control of the false discovery rate (FDR) for a multiple testing procedure is implied by two coupled simple sufficient conditions. The first one, which we call “self-consistency condition”, concerns the algorithm itself, and the second, called “dependency control condition” is related to the dependency assumptions on the p-value family. Many standard multiple testing procedures are self-consistent (e.g. step-up, step-down or step-up-down procedures), and we prove that the dependency control condition can be fulfilled when choosing correspondingly appropriate rejection functions, in three classical types of dependency: independence, positive dependency (PRDS) and unspecified dependency. As a consequence, we recover earlier results through simple and unifying proofs while extending their scope to several regards: weighted FDR, p-value reweighting, new family of step-up procedures under unspecified p-value dependency and adaptive step-up procedures. We give additional examples of other possible applications. This framework also allows for defining and studying FDR control for multiple testing procedures over a continuous, uncountable space of hypotheses.