A statistical method for the conservative adjustment of false discovery rate (q-value)

Background q-value is a widely used statistical method for estimating false discovery rate (FDR), which is a conventional significance measure in the analysis of genome-wide expression data. q-value is a random variable and it may underestimate FDR in practice. An underestimated FDR can lead to unexpected false discoveries in the follow-up validation experiments. This issue has not been well addressed in literature, especially in the situation when the permutation procedure is necessary for p-value calculation.