报告题目： Large-Scale Mediation Effect Signal Detection

报告人：郭旭博士

报告摘要：Mediation analysis is commonly adopted to assess the mediation role of DNA methylation in the causal pathway from an exposure to a clinical outcome. With high-dimensional mediators, it is important to select the truly possible mediators. In this paper, we focus on the problem of multiple testing for mediation effect with false discovery rate (FDR) control. Previous studies tried to approximate the underlying true $p$-values, however, this is not easy due to the composition nature of the null hypothesis. Instead, we introduce a novel procedure named as Mediation Identification by Splitting and Aggregation (MISA), a data-driven approach via constructing new test statistics with marginal symmetry property under null hypothesis and then utilizing the symmetry to derive a threshold. A notable feature of the proposed procedure is that no $p$-value is required. Moreover, the MISA procedure is computationally efficient --- its construction only uses a one-time split of the data and a product of two mediation effect estimators. This method achieves exact FDR control in finite sample settings when the populations are symmetric and independent no matter the number of tests or sample sizes. It is also able to control the FDR asymptotically for asymmetric populations even when the test statistics are dependent. Our procedure can also detect group mediation effect signals. Empirical results show that the resulting method has better FDR control than existing testing methods, while maintaining reasonably good detection ability. We applied the proposed method to identify DNA methylation sites that mediate the effect of ages at diagnosis on lung adenocarcinoma.

报告时间：10月31日（周一）下午15:00—16:00

报告地点：腾讯会议186-500-515

会议链接https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/llqO1jWcRqP5

报告人简介：郭旭博士，现为北京师范大学统计学院副教授，博士生导师。他于2014年获得博士学位。郭旭一直从事回归分析中的复杂统计推断包括模型设定检验和大规模显著性检验等方面的理论和应用研究，在包括统计学和计量经济学国际顶级期刊JRSSB, JASA，Biometrika和Journal of Econometrics等SCI期刊发表高水平论文30篇左右，为包括Econometrica，JASA，Journal of Econometrics，Statistica Sinica等统计学和计量经济学期刊审稿。先后主持国家自然科学基金青年基金和国家自然科学基金面上项目。曾荣获北师大第十一届“最受本科生欢迎的十佳教师”。