Date of Award
11-28-2007
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Mathematics and Statistics
First Advisor
Gengsheng Qin - Chair
Second Advisor
Xu Zhang
Third Advisor
Yixin Fang
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.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.57709/1059692
Recommended Citation
Yao, Suqin, "Empirical Likelihood Based Confidence Intervals for the Difference between Two Sensitivities of Continuous-scale Diagnostic Tests at a Fixed Level of Specificity." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2007.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/1059692