  Large-scale multiple testing with correlated and heavy-tailed data arises in
a wide range of research areas from genomics, medical imaging to finance.
Conventional methods for estimating the false discovery proportion (FDP) often
ignore the effect of heavy-tailedness and the dependence structure among test
statistics, and thus may lead to inefficient or even inconsistent estimation.
Also, the commonly imposed joint normality assumption is arguably too stringent
for many applications. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose a
Factor-Adjusted Robust Multiple Testing (FarmTest) procedure for large-scale
simultaneous inference with control of the false discovery proportion. We
demonstrate that robust factor adjustments are extremely important in both
controlling the FDP and improving the power. We identify general conditions
under which the proposed method produces consistent estimate of the FDP. As a
byproduct that is of independent interest, we establish an exponential-type
deviation inequality for a robust $U$-type covariance estimator under the
spectral norm. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate the advantage of the
proposed method over several state-of-the-art methods especially when the data
are generated from heavy-tailed distributions. The proposed procedures are
implemented in the R-package FarmTest.
