Abstract
Accurate disease diagnosis is critical for health care. New diagnostic and screening tests must be evaluated for their abilities to discriminate disease from non-diseased states. The partial area under the ROC curve (partial AUC) is a measure of diagnostic test accuracy. We present an interpretation of the partial AUC that gives rise to a new non-parametric estimator. This estimator is more robust than existing estimators, which make parametric assumptions. We show that the robustness is gained with only a moderate loss in efficiency. We describe a regression modelling framework for making inference about covariate effects on the partial AUC. Such models can help refine an understanding of test accuracy. Model parameters can be estimated using binary regression methods. We use the regression framework to compare two Prostate-Specific Antigen biomarkers and to evaluate the dependence of biomarker accuracy on the time prior to clinical diagnosis of prostate cancer.
Disciplines
Categorical Data Analysis | Clinical Epidemiology | Statistical Models
Suggested Citation
Dodd, Lori E. and Pepe, Margaret S., "Partial AUC Estimation and Regression" (January 2003). UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series. Working Paper 181.
https://biostats.bepress.com/uwbiostat/paper181
Included in
Categorical Data Analysis Commons, Clinical Epidemiology Commons, Statistical Models Commons