A unified combination framework for dependent tests with applications to microbiome association studies.

ABSTRACT: We introduce a novel meta-analysis framework to combine dependent tests under a general setting, and utilize it to synthesize various microbiome association tests that are calculated from the same dataset. Our development builds upon the classical meta-analysis methods of aggregating P-values and also a more recent general method of combining confidence distributions, but makes generalizations to handle dependent tests. The proposed framework ensures rigorous statistical guarantees, and we provide a comprehensive study and compare it with various existing dependent combination methods. Notably, we demonstrate that the widely used Cauchy combination method for dependent tests, referred to as the vanilla Cauchy combination in this article, can be viewed as a special case within our framework

SUBMITTER: Yu X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11783248 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature