The Area under the ROC Curve and Its Competitors

Jørgen Hilden

Medical Decision Making, 1991, vol. 11, issue 2, 95-101

Abstract: The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is a popular measure of the power of a (two-disease) diagnostic test, but it is shown here to be an inconsistent criterion: tests of indistinguishable clinical impacts may have different areas. A class of diagnosticity measures (DMs) of proven optimality is proposed instead. Once a regret(-like) measure of diagnostic uncertainty is agreed upon, the associated DM is uniquely defined and, indeed, calculable from the ROC curve configuration. Two scaled variants of the ROC are introduced and used to advantage in the analysis. They may also be helpful to students of medical decision making.

Keywords: Key words: decision theory; diagnostic test; receiver operating characteristic. (Med Decis Making 1991; 11:95-101) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1991
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:medema:v:11:y:1991:i:2:p:95-101

DOI: 10.1177/0272989X9101100204

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