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Improved confidence intervals for the sensitivity at a fixed level of specificity of a continuous‐scale diagnostic test
Author(s) -
Zhou XiaoHua,
Qin Gengsheng
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
statistics in medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.996
H-Index - 183
eISSN - 1097-0258
pISSN - 0277-6715
DOI - 10.1002/sim.1563
Subject(s) - confidence interval , statistics , sensitivity (control systems) , interval (graph theory) , scale (ratio) , diagnostic test , mathematics , credible interval , test (biology) , computer science , medicine , engineering , cartography , combinatorics , geography , emergency medicine , paleontology , electronic engineering , biology
For a continuous‐scale diagnostic test, it is of interest to construct a confidence interval for the sensitivity of the diagnostic test at the cut‐off that yields a predetermined level of its specificity (for example, 80, 90 or 95 per cent). In this paper we propose two new intervals for the sensitivity of a continuous‐scale diagnostic test at a fixed level of specificity. We then conduct simulation studies to compare the relative performance of these two intervals with the best existing BCa bootstrap interval, proposed by Platt et al . Our simulation results show that the newly proposed intervals are better than the BCa bootstrap interval in terms of coverage accuracy and interval length. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.