Sample-and-Forward: Communication-Efficient Control of the False Discovery Rate in NetworksThis work concerns controlling the false discovery rate (FDR) in networks
under communication constraints. We present sample-and-forward, a flexible and
communication-efficient version of the Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) procedure for
multihop networks with general topologies. Our method evidences that the nodes
in a network do not need to communicate p-values to each other to achieve a
decent statistical power under the global FDR control constraint. Consider a
network with a total of $m$ p-values, our method consists of first sampling the
(empirical) CDF of the p-values at each node and then forwarding
$\mathcal{O}(\log m)$ bits to its neighbors. Under the same assumptions as for
the original BH procedure, our method has both the provable finite-sample FDR
control as well as competitive empirical detection power, even with a few
samples at each node. We provide an asymptotic analysis of power under a
mixture model assumption on the p-values.
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