Adaptive linear step-up procedures that control the false discovery rate

The linear step-up multiple testing procedure controls the false discovery rate at the desired level q for independent and positively dependent test statistics. When all null hypotheses are true, and the test statistics are independent and continuous, the bound is sharp. When some of the null hypotheses are not true, the procedure is conservative by a factor which is the proportion m-sub-0/m of the true null hypotheses among the hypotheses. We provide a new two-stage procedure in which the linear step-up procedure is used in stage one to estimate m-sub-0, providing a new level q′ which is used in the linear step-up procedure in the second stage. We prove that a general form of the two-stage procedure controls…