Empirical Bayes Control of the False Discovery Exceedance

Abstract

In sparse large-scale testing problems where the false discovery proportion (FDP) is highly variable, the false discovery exceedance (FDX) provides a valuable alternative to the widely used false discovery rate (FDR). We develop an empirical Bayes approach to controlling the FDX. We show that for independent hypotheses from a two-group model and dependent hypotheses from a Gaussian model fulfilling the exchangeability condition, an oracle decision rule based on ranking and thresholding the local false discovery rate (lfdr) is optimal in the sense that the power is maximized subject to FDX constraint. We propose a data-driven FDX procedure that emulates the oracle via carefully designed computational shortcuts. We investigate the empirical performance of the proposed method using simulations and illustrate the merits of FDX control through an application for identifying abnormal stock trading strategies.