English

Generalized Boundary FDR Control under Arbitrary Dependence: An Approach on Closure Principle

Methodology 2026-05-12 v1

Abstract

False discovery rate (FDR) is a cornerstone of modern multiple testing. However, it often fails to guarantee the reliability of "marginal" discoveries that lie at the boundary of the rejection set, which are often crucial in high-precision applications. While recent works (Soloff et al., 2024; Xiang et al., 2025) introduced the boundary false discovery rate (bFDR) to control the error probability at the marginal discovery, their method relies on restrictive assumptions such as independence or specific prior distributions. In this paper, we first propose kk-bFDR, a novel generalization that controls the error probability of the kk least significant discoveries. We then provide a systematic investigation into the theoretical relationship between kk-bFDR and existing error metrics. Furthermore, building upon the closure principle, we develop Domino, a unified framework that guarantees kk-bFDR control under arbitrary dependence, applicable for both p-values and e-values. We prove the theoretical validity of the proposed Domino algorithm and demonstrate through extensive numerical experiments that it consistently achieves rigorous kk-bFDR control while identifying trustworthy marginal discoveries. Analyses of real data reveal that kk-bFDR control yields higher-quality rejection sets with greater practical significance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.09953,
  title  = {Generalized Boundary FDR Control under Arbitrary Dependence: An Approach on Closure Principle},
  author = {Yifan Zhang and Wentao Zhang and Changliang Zou and Haojie Ren},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.09953},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:03:09.641Z