Time-Dependent Receiver Operating Characteristic Analysis and Applications in the Field of Medicine

Authors : Ceren EFE SAYIN, İlker UNAL

Pages : 411-416

Doi:10.19127/bshealthscience.1107599

View : 24 | Download : 9

Publication Date : 2022-09-01

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :When there is a time-dependency between the biomarker and the event of interest insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(death, disease, relapse etc.);, classical receiver operating characteristic insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(ROC); analysis may not be able to estimate the true performance of the biomarker. For such cases, time-dependent ROC, an extended version of the standard ROC, is developed. In this study, the aim is to demonstrate applications of this modified ROC method on medical datasets and find out if it should be preferred over classical ROC for time-dependent situations. Comparison between classical ROC and Kaplan-Meier insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(KM); estimator, which is one of the two time-dependent ROC estimators, has been made using datasets in this study. Nearest Neighbor Estimator insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(NNE);, the alternative of KM estimator, is also applied on all datasets. Then the findings of these two approaches are compared. It is concluded that time-dependent ROC method is superior to the standard ROC analysis. In general, the closer to the event time, the higher performance is observed. Especially, biomarkers measured at last 12 or 6 months before the event are determined to be better at classification than the earlier measurements. Though in all applications KM and NNE yielded very similar results, the latter is considered to be more appropriate to evaluate the performance of a biomarker when a time dependent data is also censored. Results of this study show that time-dependent ROC analysis performs more accurately when there is a time dependency between the biomarker and the event of interest; therefore, it is recommended.
Keywords : Time dependent ROC, Diagnostic tests, Biomarker, Kaplan Meier, Nearest neighbor estimator