A Comparison of Procedures for Controlling the False Discovery Rate in the Presence of Small Variance Genes: A Simulation Study

Abstract

The Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM; Tusher et al., 2001) method is widely used in analyzing gene expression data while controlling the FDR by using resampling-based procedure in the microarray setting. One of the main components of the SAM procedure is the adjustment of the test statistic. The introduction of the fudge factor to the test statistic aims at deflating the large value of test statistics due to the small standard error of gene-expression. Lin et al. (2008) pointed out that the fudge factor does not effectively improve the power and the control of the FDR as compared to the SAM procedure without the fudge factor in the presence of small variance genes. Motivated by the simulation results presented in Lin et al. (2008), in this article, we extend our study to compare several methods for choosing the fudge factor in the modified t-type test statistics and use simulation studies to investigate the power and the control of the FDR of the considered methods.