title: Confidence intervals for the symmetry point: an optimal cutpoint in continuous diagnostic tests.
abstract: Continuous diagnostic tests are often used for discriminating between healthy and diseased populations. For this reason, it is useful to select an appropriate discrimination threshold. There are several optimality criteria: the North-West corner, the Youden index, the concordance probability and the symmetry point, among others. In this paper, we focus on the symmetry point that maximizes simultaneously the two types of correct classifications. We construct confidence intervals for this optimal cutpoint and its associated specificity and sensitivity indexes using two approaches: one based on the generalized pivotal quantity and the other on empirical likelihood. We perform a simulation study to check the practical behaviour of both methods and illustrate their use by means of three real biomedical datasets on melanoma, prostate cancer and coronary artery disease.
authors.affiliation: Biostatistics Unit, Department of Statistics and Operations Research, USC, San Francisco s/n, Santiago de Compostela, 15782, Spain.
authors.forename: Mónica
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: López-Ratón
authors.affiliation: Biostatistics Unit, Department of Statistics and Operations Research, USC, San Francisco s/n, Santiago de Compostela, 15782, Spain.
authors.forename: Carmen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cadarso-Suárez
authors.affiliation: Biostatistics Section, Department of Statistics and Operations Research, UCM, Plaza Ramón y Cajal s/n, Madrid, 28040, Spain.
authors.forename: Elisa M
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Molanes-López
authors.affiliation: Department of Artificial Intelligence, UNED, C/ Juan del Rosal 16, Madrid, 28040, Spain.
authors.forename: Emilio
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Letón
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D003324:Coronary Artery Disease / Q000175:diagnosis*; D016208:Databases, Factual / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003955:Diagnostic Tests, Routine / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis*
keywords: ROC curve; cut-off value; empirical likelihood; generalized pivotal quantity