On empirical Bayes simultaneous selection procedures for comparing normal populations with a standard

In this paper, we derive statistical selection procedures to partition k normal populations into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ones, respectively, using the nonparametric empirical Bayes approach. The relative regret risk of a selection procedure is used as a measure of its performance. We establish the asymptotic optimality of the proposed empirical Bayes selection procedures and investigate the associated rates of convergence. Under a very mild condition, the proposed empirical Bayes selection procedures are shown to have rates of convergence of order close to O(k^−1/2) where k is the number of populations involved in the selection problem. With further strong assumptions, the empirical Bayes selection procedures have rates of convergence of order O(k^{−α(r−1)/(2r+1)}), where 1<α<2 and r is an integer greater than 2.