a boosting method for maximizing the partial area under the roc curve最大化的提高方法部分roc曲线下的面积.pdfVIP

Komori and Eguchi BMC Bioinformatics 2010, 11:314 /1471-2105/11/314 M E T H O D O L O G Y A R T I C L E Open Access Methodology article A boosting method for maximizing the partial area under the ROC curve 1 1,2 Osamu Komori* and Shinto Eguchi Abstract Background: The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is a fundamental tool to assess the discriminant performance for not only a single marker but also a score function combining multiple markers. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) for a score function measures the intrinsic ability for the score function to discriminate between the controls and cases. Recently, the partial AUC (pAUC) has been paid more attention than the AUC, because a suitable range of the false positive rate can be focused according to various clinical situations. However, existing pAUC-based methods only handle a few markers and do not take nonlinear combination of markers into consideration. Results: We have developed a new statistical method that focuses on the pAUC based on a boosting technique. The markers are combined componentially for maximizing the pAUC in the boosting algorithm using natural cubic splines or decision stumps (single-level decision trees), according to the values of markers (continuous or discrete). We show that the resulting score plots are useful for understanding how each marker is associated with the outcome variable. We compare the performance of the proposed boosting method with those of other existing methods, and demonstrate the utility using real data sets. As a result, we have much better discrimination performances in the sense of the pAUC in both simulation studies and real data analysis. Conclusions: The proposed method addresses how to combine the markers after a pAUC-based filtering procedure in high dimension