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A comparative study of methods for testing the equality of two or more ROC curves

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Abstract

The problem of comparing the accuracy of diagnostic tests is usually carried out through the comparison of the corresponding receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. This matter has been approached from different perspectives. Usually, ROC curves are compared through their respective areas under the curve, but in cases where there is no uniform dominance between the involved curves other procedures are preferred. Although the asymptotic distributions of the statistics behind these methods are, in general, known, resampling plans are considered. With the purpose of comparing the performance of different approaches, with different ways of calibrating the distribution of the tests, a simulation study is carried out in order to investigate the statistical power and the nominal level of each methodology.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank associate editor, the Co-Editor and the reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this manuscript. The research of A. Fanjul-Hevia is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport “Beca de Formación de Profesorado Universitario”; fellowship (FPU14/05316). Both authors acknowledged the support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through grant numbers MTM2013-41383P and MTM2016-76969-P, which includes support from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The research of W. González-Manteiga is also supported by the the IAP network P7/06 StUDyS of the Belgian Government (Belgian Science Policy).

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Correspondence to Arís Fanjul-Hevia.

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Fanjul-Hevia, A., González-Manteiga, W. A comparative study of methods for testing the equality of two or more ROC curves. Comput Stat 33, 357–377 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00180-017-0783-6

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