False Discovery Proportion control for aggregated Knockoffs

Alexandre Blain, Bertrand Thirion, Olivier Grisel, Pierre Neuvial

Keywords: Knockoffs, Derandomization of Knockoffs, False Discoveries Proportion control, Controlled variable selection, Statistical inference, High-dimensional inference

Abstract: Controlled variable selection is an important analytical step in various scientific fields, such as brain imaging or genomics. In these high-dimensional data settings, considering too many variables leads to poor models and high costs, hence the need for statistical guarantees on false positives. Knockoffs are a popular statistical tool for conditional variable selection in high dimension. However, they control for the expected proportion of false discoveries (FDR) and not the actual proportion of false discoveries (FDP). We present a new method, KOPI, that controls the proportion of false discoveries for Knockoff-based inference. The proposed method also relies on a new type of aggregation to address the undesirable randomness associated with classical Knockoff inference. We demonstrate FDP control and substantial power gains over existing Knockoff-based methods in various simulation settings and achieve good sensitivity/specificity tradeoffs on brain imaging data.

Submission Number: 2949