Multiple Testing

Benjamin Hochberg?

http://sas-and-r.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/example-930-addressing-multiple.html

We've been more sensitive to accounting for multiple comparisons recently, in part due to work that Nick and colleagues published on the topic.

In this entry, we consider results from a randomized trial (Kypri et al., 2009) to reduce problem drinking in Australian university students.
Seven outcomes were pre-specified: three designated as primary and four as secondary. No adjustment for multiple comparisons was undertaken. The p-values were given as 0.001, 0.001 for the primary outcomes and 0.02 and .001, .22, .59 and .87 for the secondary outcomes.
In this entry, we detail how to adjust for multiplicity using R and SAS.

R

The p.adjust() function in R calculates a variety of different approaches for multiplicity adjustments given a vector of p-values. These include the Bonferroni procedure (where the alpha is divided by the number of tests or equivalently the p-value is multiplied by that number, and truncated back to 1 if the result is not a probability). Other, less conservative corrections are also included (these are Holm (1979), Hochberg (1988), Hommel (1988), Benjamini and Hochberg (1995) and Benjamini and Yekutieli (2001)). The first four methods provide strong control for the family-wise error rate and all dominate the Bonferroni procedure. Here we compare the results from the unadjusted, Benjamini and Hochberg method="BH" and Bonferroni procedure for the Kypri et al. study.

pvals = c(.001, .001, .001, .02, .22, .59, .87)
BONF = p.adjust(pvals, "bonferroni")
BH = p.adjust(pvals, "BH")
res = cbind(pvals, BH=round(BH, 3), BONF=round(BONF, 3))