DiscreteFDR: An R package for controlling the false discovery rate for discrete test statistics

Abstract

The simultaneous analysis of many statistical tests is ubiquitous in applications. Perhaps the most popular error rate used for avoiding type one error inflation is the false discovery rate (FDR). However, most theoretical and software development for FDR control has focused on the case of continuous test statistics. For discrete data, methods that provide proven FDR control and good performance have been proposed only recently. The R package DiscreteFDR provides an implementation of these methods. For particular commonly used discrete tests such as Fisher's exact test, it can be applied as an off-the-shelf tool by taking only the raw data as input. It can also be used for any arbitrary discrete test statistics by using some additional information on the distribution of these statistics. The paper reviews the statistical methods in a non-technical way, provides a detailed description of the implementation in DiscreteFDR and presents some sample code and analyses.