Editorial for the Special Collection “MCP 2022”

Abstract

This special collection on Multiple Comparisons arose from the 12th International Conference on Multiple Comparison Procedures (MCP 2022) that took place from August 30 to September 2, 2022, at the University of Bremen, Germany. The conference was hosted locally by Professors Werner Brannath and Thorsten Dickhaus. MCP 2022 continued the tradition of this conference series. The contributions to the conference covered the latest methodological and applied developments in the areas of simultaneous and selective inference, including testing, confidence intervals, estimation, adaptive designs, statistical modelling, and machine learning approaches, under a variety of error rates to be controlled.

This article collection contains theoretical papers on multiple comparisons by Budig et al. (2024), Chen et al. (2024), Pöhlmann et al. (2024), and by Ochieng et al. (2024). Several sessions of MCP 2022 included contributions dealing with online control of the family-wise error rate or the false discovery rate, respectively. The papers by Fischer et al. (2024) and by Fisher (2024) in this special collection reflect this current research direction. Bounding the number or the proportion, respectively, of false discoveries is considered in the papers by Xu et al. (2024) and by Zheng et al. (2024). Statistical methods for planning and evaluating studies with adaptive or group-sequential designs are developed in the papers by Danzer et al. (2024) and by Zhao et al. (2025), and platform trials are studied by Greenstreet et al. (2025).

After the long time without face-to-face meetings because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference delegates (Figure 1) enjoyed the social program of MCP 2022, which included an evening reception in Bremen's historic Town Hall as well as a boat trip to Bremerhaven.