Adaptive procedures for directional false discovery rate control

Abstract

In multiple hypothesis testing, it is well known that adaptive procedures can enhance power via incorporating information about the number of true nulls present. Under independence, we establish that two adaptive false discovery rate (FDR) methods, upon augmenting sign declarations, also offer directional false discovery rate ($\text{FDR}\text{dir}$) control in the strong sense. Such $\text{FDR}\text{dir}$ controlling properties are appealing, because adaptive procedures have the greatest potential to reap substantial gain in power when the underlying parameter configurations contain little to no true nulls, which are precisely settings where the $\text{FDR}\text{dir}$ is an arguably more meaningful error rate to be controlled than the FDR.