Since ROC curves have become ubiquitous in many application areas, the various advances have been scattered across disparate articles and texts. ROC Curves for Continuous Data is the first book solely devoted to the subject, bringing together all the relevant material to provide a clear understanding of how to analyze ROC curves. The fundamental theory of ROC curvesThe book first discusses the relationship between the ROC curve and numerous performance measures and then extends the theory into practice by describing how ROC curves are estimated. Further building on the theory, the authors present statistical tests for ROC curves and their summary statistics. They consider the impact of covariates on ROC curves, examine the important special problem of comparing two ROC curves, and cover Bayesian methods for ROC analysis. Special topicsThe text then moves on to extensions of the basic analysis to cope with more complex situations, such as the combination of multiple ROC curves and problems induced by the presence of more than two classes. Focusing on design and interpretation issues, it covers missing data, verification bias, sample size determination, the design of ROC studies, and the choice of optimum threshold from the ROC curve. The final chapter explores applications that not only illustrate some of the techniques but also demonstrate the very wide applicability of these techniques across different disciplines. With nearly 5,000 articles published to date relating to ROC analysis, the explosive interest in ROC curves and their analysis will continue in the foreseeable future. Embracing this growth of interest, this timely book will undoubtedly guide present and future users of ROC analysis.

Since ROC curves have become ubiquitous in many application areas, the various advances have been scattered across disparate articles and texts. ROC Curves for Continuous Data is the first book solely devoted to the subject, bringing together all the relevant material to provide a clear understanding of how to analyze ROC curves. The fundamental theory of ROC curves The book first discusses the relationship between the ROC curve and numerous performance measures and then extends the theory into practice by describing how ROC curves are estimated. Further building on the theory, the authors present statistical tests for ROC curves and their summary statistics. They consider the impact of covariates on ROC curves, examine the important special problem of comparing two ROC curves, and cover Bayesian methods for ROC analysis. Special topics The text then moves on to extensions of the basic analysis to cope with more complex situations, such as the combination of multiple ROC curves and problems induced by the presence of more than two classes. Focusing on design and interpretation issues, it covers missing data, verification bias, sample size determination, the design of ROC studies, and the choice of optimum threshold from the ROC curve. The final chapter explores applications that not only illustrate some of the techniques but also demonstrate the very wide applicability of these techniques across different disciplines. With nearly 5,000 articles published to date relating to ROC analysis, the explosive interest in ROC curves and their analysis will continue in the foreseeable future. Embracing this growth of interest, this timely book will undoubtedly guide present and future users of ROC analysis.

This graduate-level text provides a survey of the logic and reasoning underpinning statistical analysis, as well as giving a broad-brush overview of the various statistical techniques that play a major roll in scientific and social investigations. Arranged in rough historical order, the text starts with the ideas of provability that underpin statistical methods and progresses through the developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to modern concerns and solutions. Assuming only a basic level of Mathematics and with numerous examples and illustrations, this text presents a valuable resource not only to the experienced researcher but also to the student, by complementing courses in a wide range of substantive areas and enabling the reader to rise above the details in order to see the overall structure of the subject.

This book provides a state of the art summary on the general theme of descriptive multivariate analysis. It consists of a collection of commissioned, edited articles by an international group of leading researchers: Phipps Arabie (Rutgers University) writes on "Clustering from the Perspective of Combinatorial Data Analysis." Bernard Flury (Indiana University) includes some highly novel and previously unpublished work in "Principal Component Models for Patterned Covariance Matrices." David Edwards' (University of Novi Nordisk, Denmark) "Graphical Modelling" and the chapter on "Convergent Computation" provide thorough and useful surveys of recent research not available in other texts on multivariate analysis. Other contributions include James Ramsay (McGill University, Montreal); Clause Wiehs (CIBA-GEIGY, Bosle); Willen Heiser (University of Leiden); and Ruben Gabriel (University of Rochester, New York). The material should provide a useful reference for graduate students and researchers.

This graduate-level text provides a survey of the logic and reasoning underpinning statistical analysis, as well as giving a broad-brush overview of the various statistical techniques that play a major roll in scientific and social investigations. Arranged in rough historical order, the text starts with the ideas of probability that underpin statistical methods and progresses through the developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to modern concerns and solutions. Assuming only a basic level of Mathematics and with numerous examples and illustrations, this text presents a valuable resource not only to the experienced researcher but also to the student, by complementing courses in a wide range of substantive areas and enabling the reader to rise above the details in order to see the overall structure of the subject.