Discovering the False Discovery Rate

Last night my wife and I attended an outstanding lecture* in the UTHSC-SA/UTSA Bioinformatics and Proteomics Series by Dr Keith Baggerly, Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, talking about the statistical analysis of mass spectrometry data for proteomics. One topic that came up after the talk was false discovery rate, which Dr Baggerly had well under control. I decided to do some brushing up on FDR, and found that the seminal papers are recent, and on the web!

• Benjamini, Y., and Hochberg Y. (1995). "Controlling the false discovery
  rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological) 57 (1), 289–300
• Benjamini, Y., and Yekutieli, D. (2001). "The Control of the False Discovery Rate in Multiple Testing under Dependency,". The Annals of Statistics 29 (4), 1165–1188.
• Storey, J. D. (2002). "A direct approach to false discovery rates." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 64, 479–498.
• Storey, J. D. (2003). "The positive false discovery rate: A Bayesian interpretation and the q-value." Annals of Statistics 31, 2013–2035

I shamelessly copied these links from Wikipedia, but a quick check of the Current Index of Statistics assured me that these are the earliest general papers on the subject. There are some interesting references about the Student-Newman-Kuels test (multiple comparisons in ANOVA) that will be worthwhile for my statistical methods classes–something else to do on the Christmas break.

*The lecture was preceded by an informal dinner catered by Nyo-Shii, one of Dr Ko’s favorite hangouts. Tasty!