Statistical inference and data mining: false discoveries control

Data Mining is characterised by its ability at processing large amounts of data. Among those are the data ”features”- variables or association rules that can be derived from them. Selecting the most interesting features is a classical data mining problem. That selection requires a large number of tests from which arise a number of false discoveries. An original non parametric control method is proposed in this paper. A new criterion, UAFWER, defined as the risk of exceeding a pre-set number of false discoveries, is controlled by BS FD, a bootstrap based algorithm that can be used on one- or two-sided problems. The usefulness of the procedure is illustrated by the selection of differentially interesting association rules on genetic data