Every few days, we will be publishing layman’s abstracts of new articles from our prestigious portfolio of journals in statistics. The aim is to highlight the latest research to a broader audience in an accessible format.
The article featured today is from Statistics in Medicine, with the full article now available to read here.
Small area estimation of receiver operating characteristic curves for ordinal data under stochastic ordering. Statistics in Medicine. 2020; 39: 1514– 1528. https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.8493
, , , .There has been a recent increase in the diagnosis of diseases through radiographic images such as x-rays and computed tomography. The outcome of a radiological diagnostic test is often in the form of ordinal data, and we usually summarize the performance of the diagnostic test using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and the area under the curve (AUC). The ROC curve will be concave and called proper when the outcomes of the diagnostic test in the actually-positive subjects are higher than in the actually-negative subjects. The diagnostic test for disease detection is clinically useful when a ROC curve is proper. In this study, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian model to estimate the proper ROC curve and AUC using stochastic ordering in several domains when the outcome of the diagnostic test is ordinal data and compare it with the model without stochastic ordering. The model without stochastic ordering can estimate the improper ROC curve with a non-concave shape or a hook when the true ROC curve of the population is a proper ROC curve. Therefore, the model with stochastic ordering is preferable over the model without stochastic ordering to estimate the proper ROC curve with clinical usefulness for ordinal data.