  Within a Bayesian decision theoretic framework we investigate some asymptotic
optimality properties of a large class of multiple testing rules. A parametric
setup is considered, in which observations come from a normal scale mixture
model and the total loss is assumed to be the sum of losses for individual
tests. Our model can be used for testing point null hypotheses, as well as to
distinguish large signals from a multitude of very small effects. A rule is
defined to be asymptotically Bayes optimal under sparsity (ABOS), if within our
chosen asymptotic framework the ratio of its Bayes risk and that of the Bayes
oracle (a rule which minimizes the Bayes risk) converges to one. Our main
interest is in the asymptotic scheme where the proportion p of "true"
alternatives converges to zero. We fully characterize the class of fixed
threshold multiple testing rules which are ABOS, and hence derive conditions
for the asymptotic optimality of rules controlling the Bayesian False Discovery
Rate (BFDR). We finally provide conditions under which the popular
Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) and Bonferroni procedures are ABOS and show that for a
wide class of sparsity levels, the threshold of the former can be approximated
by a nonrandom threshold.
