onlineFDR: an R package to control the false discovery rate for growing data repositories.

Abstract

In many areas of biological research, hypotheses are tested in a sequential manner, without having access to future P-values or even the number of hypotheses to be tested. A key setting where this online hypothesis testing occurs is in the context of publicly available data repositories, where the family of hypotheses to be tested is continually growing as new data is accumulated over time. Recently, Javanmard and Montanari proposed the first procedures that control the FDR for online hypothesis testing. We present an R package, onlineFDR, which implements these procedures and provides wrapper functions to apply them to a historic dataset or a growing data repository. The R package is freely available through Bioconductor (http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/onlineFDR). Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.