Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Comparing The Structural Components Variance Estimator And U-Statistics Variance Estimator When Assessing The Difference Between Correlated Aucs With Finite Samples, Anna L. Bosse

Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: The structural components variance estimator proposed by DeLong et al. (1988) is a popular approach used when comparing two correlated AUCs. However, this variance estimator is biased and could be problematic with small sample sizes.

Methods: A U-statistics based variance estimator approach is presented and compared with the structural components variance estimator through a large-scale simulation study under different finite-sample size configurations.

Results: The U-statistics variance estimator was unbiased for the true variance of the difference between correlated AUCs regardless of the sample size and had lower RMSE than the structural components variance estimator, providing better type 1 error …