Type of Document Master's Thesis Author Yao, Suqin URN etd-11272007-145522 Title Empirical Likelihood Based Confidence Intervals for the Difference between Two Sensitivities of Continuous-scale Diagnostic Tests at a Fixed Level of Specificity Degree Master of Science Department Mathematics and Statistics Advisory Committee
Advisor Name Title Gengsheng Qin Committee Chair Xu Zhang Committee Member Yixin Fang Committee Member Keywords
- specificity
- sensitivity
- diagnostic test
- Empirical likelihood
Date of Defense 2007-11-26 Availability unrestricted Abstract Diagnostic testing is essential to distinguish non-diseased individuals from diseased individuals. The sensitivity and specificity are two important indices for the diagnostic accuracy of continuous-scale diagnostic tests. If we want to compare the effectiveness of two tests, it is of interest to construct a confidence interval for the difference of the two sensitivities at a fixed level of specificity. In this thesis, we propose two empirical likelihood based confidence intervals (HBELI and HBELII) for the difference of two sensitivities at a predetermined specificity level. Simulation studies show that when correlation between the two test results exists, HBELI and HBELII intervals perform better than the existing bootstrap based BCa, BTI and BTII intervals due to shorter interval lengths. However, when there is no correlation, BCa, BTI and BTII intervals outperform HBELI and HBELII intervals due to better coverage probability in most simulation settings.Files
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