Search for: All records

ABSTRACT In many applications, the process of identifying a specific feature of interest often involves testing multiple hypotheses for their joint statistical significance. Examples include mediation analysis, which simultaneously examines the existence of the exposure-mediator and the mediator-outcome effects, and replicability analysis, aiming to identify simultaneous signals that exhibit statistical significance across multiple independent studies. In this work, we present a new approach called the joint mirror (JM) procedure that effectively detects such features while maintaining false discovery rate (FDR) control in finite samples. The JM procedure employs an iterative method that gradually shrinks the rejection region based on progressively revealed information until a conservative estimate of the false discovery proportion is below the target FDR level. Additionally, we introduce a more stringent error measure known as the composite FDR (cFDR), which assigns weights to each false discovery based on its number of null components. We use the leave-one-out technique to prove that the JM procedure controls the cFDR in finite samples. To implement the JM procedure, we propose an efficient algorithm that can incorporate partial ordering information. Through extensive simulations, we show that our procedure effectively controls the cFDR and enhances statistical power across various scenarios, including the case that test statistics are dependent across the features. Finally, we showcase the utility of our method by applying it to real-world mediation and replicability analyses. 

Sparse canonical correlation analysis (sCCA) has been a useful approach for integrating different high-dimensional datasets by finding a subset of correlated features that explain the most correlation in the data. In the context of microbiome studies, investigators are always interested in knowing how the microbiome interacts with the host at different molecular levels such as genome, methylol, transcriptome, metabolome and proteome. sCCA provides a simple approach for exploiting the correlation structure among multiple omics data and finding a set of correlated omics features, which could contribute to understanding the host-microbiome interaction. However, existing sCCA methods do not address compositionality, and its application to microbiome data is thus not optimal. This paper proposes a new sCCA framework for integrating microbiome data with other high-dimensional omics data, accounting for the compositional nature of microbiome sequencing data. It also allows integrating prior structure information such as the grouping structure among bacterial taxa by imposing a “soft” constraint on the coefficients through varying penalization strength. As a result, the method provides significant improvement when the structure is informative while maintaining robustness against a misspecified structure. Through extensive simulation studies and real data analysis, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over the state-of-the-art approaches.