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    An assessment of the effectiveness of multiple hypothesis testing for geographical anomaly detection


    Brunsdon, Chris and Charlton, Martin (2011) An assessment of the effectiveness of multiple hypothesis testing for geographical anomaly detection. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 38 (2). pp. 216-230. ISSN 0265-8135

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    Abstract

    The practice of multiple significance testing is reviewed, and an alternative to the frequently used Bonferroni correction is considered. Rather than controlling the family-wise error rate (FWER) ˆ the probability of a false positive in any of the significance tests ˆ this alternative due to Benjamini and Hochberg controls the false discovery rate (FDR). This is the proportion of tests reporting a significant result that are actually `false alarms'. The methods (and some variants) are demonstrated on a procedure to detect clusters of full-time unpaid carers based on UK census data, and are also assessed using simulation. Simulation results show that the FDR-based corrections are typically more powerful than FWER-based ones, and also that the degree of conservatism in FWER-based proce- dures is quite extreme, to the extent that the standard Bonferroni procedure intended to constrain the FWER to be below 0.05 actually has a FWER of around 6 X 10 -5 . We conclude that in situations where one is scanning for anomalies, the extreme conservatism of FWER-based approaches results in a lack of power, and that FDR-based approaches are more appropriate

    Item Type: Article
    Keywords: multiple hypothesis testing; geographical anomaly detection;
    Academic Unit: Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > National Centre for Geocomputation, NCG
    Item ID: 5757
    Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1068/b36093
    Depositing User: Martin Charlton
    Date Deposited: 02 Feb 2015 17:24
    Journal or Publication Title: Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design
    Publisher: Pion
    Refereed: Yes
    URI:
    Use Licence: This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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