manytestsr

Testing to detect and localize heterogeneous effects in block-randomized experiments.

This package implements the nesting (top-down) procedures detailed in Bowers and Chen (2020). It recursively splits experimental blocks, tests for treatment effects at each node, and controls familywise error using adaptive alpha adjustment — so you can ask not just whether a treatment worked, but where it worked.

Warning: development-stage package

This package is under active development. The API may change without notice, and not all procedures have proven statistical properties yet. If you use it in applied work, pin a specific commit or version and check back for updates.

Current version: 0.0.4.1002

Installation

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("bowers-illinois-edu/manytestsr")

The package includes C++ code (via Rcpp/RcppArmadillo) and requires a working C++ compiler. On macOS, install Xcode Command Line Tools; on Windows, install Rtools.

Public TODO list

Items marked with a check are done. Items without a check are open — they represent known limitations or planned work.

Alpha adjustment and error control

• Adaptive alpha adjustment for tree-structured testing (compute_adaptive_alphas, alpha_adaptive)
• Tree-based alpha schedules for irregular trees (compute_adaptive_alphas_tree, alpha_adaptive_tree)
• Branch-pruning adaptive alpha that reallocates alpha from dead branches (alpha_adaptive_tree_pruned)
• Error-load diagnostics (compute_error_load)
• Remove or deprecate the sequential (stream-based) alpha procedures (alpha_investing, alpha_saffron, alpha_addis) from onlineFDR. These treat p-values as a flat stream and do not have provable FWER control properties for tree-structured testing.

Local p-value adjustment

• Modify the "local Hommel" style adjustments (local_hommel_all_ps) to operate level-by-level rather than node-by-node.

Testing

• Incorporate a test of the sharp null of no effect for any unit, from the CMRSS package.

Documentation and usability

• Complete the vignettes (getting-started, hierarchical-testing-workflow, advanced-methodologies).
• Add a worked example to this README.

Key functions

Function	Purpose
find_blocks()	Core recursive splitting and testing procedure
compute_adaptive_alphas()	Depth-adjusted significance levels for regular trees
alpha_adaptive_tree_pruned()	Branch-pruning alpha for irregular trees
compute_error_load()	Diagnose whether natural gating controls FWER
splitCluster, splitEqualApprox, splitLOO, splitSpecifiedFactor	Splitting strategies
pOneway, pWilcox, pIndepDist, pCombCauchyDist	P-value functions for different test statistics
local_hommel_all_ps, local_simes, local_bh_all_ps	Local p-value adjustment
make_results_tree, make_results_ggraph	Visualization of results

Development

make document   # generate roxygen2 documentation
make test       # run test suite
make check      # R CMD check
make build      # build the package

The project uses renv for dependency management. Run make dependencies to install required packages.

Implementation notes

Distance and transformation calculations use C++ (Rcpp/RcppArmadillo) with three code paths selected by dataset size:

• fast_dists_by_unit_arma2_par — OpenMP parallel processing (parallel = "yes")
• fast_dists_and_trans — direct matrix computation for small N
• fast_dists_and_trans_by_unit_arma — unit-by-unit computation for N > 20, avoiding large matrices in memory