BIMSA General Lecture | Harnessing The Collective Wisdom: Fusion Learning Using Decision Sequences From Diverse Sources

Abstract

Learning from the collective wisdom of crowds enhances the transparency of scientific findings by incorporating diverse perspectives into the decision-making process. However, fusing inferences from diverse sources is challenging since cross-source heterogeneity and potential data-sharing complicate statistical inference. Moreover, studies may rely on disparate designs, employ widely different modeling techniques for inferences, and prevailing data privacy norms may forbid sharing even summary statistics across the studies for an overall analysis. We propose an Integrative Ranking and Thresholding (IRT) framework for fusion learning in multiple testing. IRT operates under the setting where from each study a triplet is available: the vector of binary accept-reject decisions on the tested hypotheses, the study- specific False Discovery Rate (FDR) level and the hypotheses tested by the study. Under this setting, IRT constructs an aggregated, nonparametric, and discriminatory measure of evidence against each null hypotheses, which facilitates ranking the hypotheses in the order of their likelihood of being rejected. We show that IRT guarantees an overall FDR control under arbitrary dependence between the evidence measures as long as the studies control their respective FDR at the desired levels.

Speaker Intro

Gang Bowen（刚博文） is a lecturer at Fudan University. He mainly focuses on multiple hypothesis testing, online learning, and other research. He has published multiple papers in journals such as JASA and Statistica Sinica.