Statistics

Receiver operating characteristic

Mathematics

The Lancet Digital Health

Clinicians often ask biostatisticians to provide a judgement on the quality of a prediction model. The prediction quality can be assessed with different performance criteria, with discriminative ability being a main issue: how well can we separate high-risk from low-risk patients? Discriminative ability is typically quantified by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) when we consider prediction of a binary event.

Interpreting area under the receiver operating characteristic curve