A modified Wald interval for the area under the ROC curve (AUC) in diagnostic case-control studies.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, referred to as the AUC, is an appropriate measure for describing the overall accuracy of a diagnostic test or a biomarker in early phase trials without having to choose a threshold. There are many approaches for estimating the confidence interval for the AUC. However, all are relatively complicated to implement. Furthermore, many approaches perform poorly for large AUC values or small sample sizes.

Methods

The AUC is actually a probability. So we propose a modified Wald interval for a single proportion, which can be calculated on a pocket calculator. We performed a simulation study to compare this modified Wald interval (without and with continuity correction) with other intervals regarding coverage

SUBMITTER: Kottas M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3938139 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature