Statistical Methodology Commons^™

Matching Methods For Biomarker Evaluation: A Mapping With Causal Inference, Debashis Ghosh, Michael Sabel

Debashis Ghosh

In many medical settings, there is interest in evaluating the predictive ability of a candidate biomarker while adjusting appropriately for confounding factors. Recently, Janes and Pepe (2008, {\it Biometrics} 64: 1 -- 9) evaluated the effects of matching on classification accuracy for biomarkers. In this article, we note an analogy between the use of matching in causal inference with its role in the biomarker evaluation problem. This leads us to be able to import much of the literature on matching from causal inferential settings to the biomarker evaluation problem. This leads to a theoretical characterization of the bias properties of …