Speeding up Permutation Testing in Neuroimaging

Multiple hypothesis testing is a significant problem in nearly all neuroimaging studies. In order to correct for this phenomena, we require a reliable estimate of the Family-Wise Error Rate (FWER). The well known Bonferroni correction method, while being simple to implement, is quite conservative, and can substantially under-power a study because it ignores dependencies between test statistics. Permutation testing, on the other hand, is an exact, non-parametric method of estimating the FWER for a given α-threshold, but for acceptably low thresholds the computational burden can be prohibitive. In this paper, we observe that permutation testing in fact amounts to populating the columns of a very large matrix P. By analyzing the spectrum of this matrix, under certain conditions, we see that P has a low-rank plus a low-variance residual decomposition which makes it suitable for highly sub–sampled — on the order of 0.5% — matrix completion methods. Thus, we propose a novel permutation testing methodology which offers a large speedup, without sacrificing the fidelity of the estimated FWER. Our evaluations on four different neuroimaging datasets show that a computational speedup factor of roughly 50× can be achieved while recovering the FWER distribution up to very high accuracy. Further, we show that the estimated α-threshold is also recovered faithfully, and is stable.