Robust estimation of the false discovery rate.
BACKGROUND
Presently available methods that use p-values to estimate or control the false discovery rate (FDR) implicitly assume that p-values are continuously distributed and based on two-sided tests. Therefore, it is difficult to reliably estimate the FDR when p-values are discrete or based on one-sided tests.


RESULTS
A simple and robust method to estimate the FDR is proposed. The proposed method does not rely on implicit assumptions that tests are two-sided or yield continuously distributed p-values. The proposed method is proven to be conservative and have desirable large-sample properties. In addition, the proposed method was among the best performers across a series of 'real data simulations' comparing the performance of five currently available methods.


BACKGROUND
Libraries of S-plus and R routines to implement the method are freely available from www.stjuderesearch.org/depts/biostats.
Pounds
Stan
S
Department of Biostatistics, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital 332 N. Lauderdale Street, Memphis, TN 38135, USA.
Cheng
Cheng
C
D000465:Algorithms; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D005189:False Positive Reactions; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000379:methods*; D046228:Microarray Analysis; D008957:Models, Genetic; D015233:Models, Statistical; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012984:Software