Contextual Online False Discovery Rate Control

Abstract

Multiple hypothesis testing, a situation when we wish to consider many hypotheses, is a core problem in statistical inference that arises in almost every scientific field. In this setting, controlling the false discovery rate (FDR), which is the expected proportion of type I error, is an important challenge for making meaningful inferences. In this paper, we consider the problem of controlling FDR in an online manner. Concretely, we consider an ordered, possibly infinite, sequence of hypotheses, arriving one at each timestep, and for each hypothesis we observe a p-value along with a set of features specific to that hypothesis. The decision whether or not to reject the current hypothesis must be made immediately at each timestep, before the next hypothesis is observed. The model of multi-dimensional feature set provides a very general way of leveraging the auxiliary information in the data which helps in maximizing the number of discoveries. We propose a new class of powerful online testing procedures, where the rejections thresholds (significance levels) are learnt sequentially by incorporating contextual information and previous results. We prove that any rule in this class controls online FDR under some standard assumptions. We then focus on a subclass of these procedures, based on weighting significance levels, to derive a practical algorithm that learns a parametric weight function in an online fashion to gain more discoveries. We also theoretically prove, in a stylized setting, that our proposed procedures would lead to an increase in the achieved statistical power over a popular online testing procedure proposed by Javanmard & Montanari (2018). Finally, we demonstrate the favorable performance of our procedure, by comparing it to state-of-the-art online multiple testing procedures, on both synthetic data and real data generated from different applications.