Multiple test procedures other than Bonferroni's deserve wider use

BMJ 1999;318:600 ( 27 February )

Letters

Multiple test procedures other than Bonferroni's deserve wider use

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EDITOR $---$ Recently, Perneger tried to establish that adjustments for multiple testing are unnecessary.¹ However, the mainarguments against multiplicity adjustments are based on misunderstandingof and a lack of knowledge about simultaneous statisticalinference.

Firstly, Perneger equated multiple test adjustments with Bonferroni corrections. The Bonferroni procedure ignores dependenciesamong the data and is therefore much too conservative if the numberof tests is large.² Hence, we agree with Perneger that theBonferroni method should not be routinely used. This is, however,no argument against the use of multiplicity adjustments in general,as there are several alternative multiple test procedures whichwere totally ignored by Perneger.³

Secondly, Perneger argued that multiple test adjustments are concerned only with the global null hypothesis that all individualnull hypotheses are true simultaneously. This is not true. Thebest multiple test procedures control the multiple level (alsocalled experimentwise error rate in the strong . . . [Full text of this article]