E-values, Multiple Testing and Beyond

Abstract: We discover a connection between the Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) procedure and the recently proposed e-BH procedure [Wang and Ramdas, 2022] with a suitably defined set of e-values. This insight extends to a generalized version of the BH procedure and the model-free multiple testing procedure in Barber and Cand`es 2015 with a general form of rejection rules. The connection provides an effective way of developing new multiple testing procedures by aggregating or assembling e-values resulting from the BH and BC procedures and their use in different subsets of the data. In particular, we propose new multiple testing methodologies in three applications, including a hybrid approach that integrates the BH and BC procedures, a multiple testing procedure aimed at ensuring a new notion of fairness by controlling both the group-wise and overall false discovery rates (FDR), and a structure adaptive multiple testing procedure that can incorporate external covariate information to boost detection power. One notable feature of the proposed methods is that we use a data-dependent approach for assigning weights to e-values, significantly enhancing the efficiency of the resulting e-BH procedure. The construction of the weights is non-trivial and is motivated by the leave-one-out analysis for the BH and BC procedures. In theory, we prove that the proposed e-BH procedures with data-dependent weights in the three applications ensure finite sample FDR control. Furthermore, we demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods through numerical studies in the three applications.