Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Analysis Of Placement Values For Evaluating Discriminatory Measures, Margaret S. Pepe, Tianxi Cai

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

The idea of using measurements such as biomarkers, clinical data, or molecular biology assays for classification and prediction is popular in modern medicine. The scientific evaluation of such measures includes assessing the accuracy with which they predict the outcome of interest. Receiver operating characteristic curves are commonly used for evaluating the accuracy of diagnostic tests. They can be applied more broadly, indeed to any problem involving classification to two states or populations (D = 0 or D = 1). We show that the ROC curve can be interpreted as a cumulative distribution function for the discriminatory measure Y in the …