I am using a MonteCarlo approach to study the correlation between traits. Basically I am generating multiple datasets and calculating null distributions for each pairwise correlation and then comparing the empirical estimates in order to access significance. The results are as expected: using the MC approach I obtain almost the same result if I just observed significant pairwise cases using parametric approaches.

In the parametric case I can apply a correction for multiple tests and obtain a more reasonable result. However, in the non-parametric case a correction for multiple-cases don't seem to be easy to apply. Since the p-value depends on the number of iterations, and since I have a large correlation matrix, its very hard to obtain corrected p-values that will result in any significant correlation. I tried to produce a large number of iterations but i had to perform something around 10^6 runs before I could obtain any kind of significant result.

I am inclined to just give up on the MC approach and just focus on parametric methods for this particular test, but i wonder if there is a way to do a sensible correction in this case.

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