{"doi":"10.5705/ss.202024.0195","title":"Maximizing Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve for Biomarker Combination","abstract":"Multiple biomarkers are often combined for more accurate disease diagnosis.For this purpose, one popular performance metric is the area under the receiving operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC).Optimizing the empirical AUC over linear combinations of biomarkers, however, faces two primary challenges.First, AUC is scale-invariant to the linear combinations, creating difficulties in both the computation and asymptotic study.Most available approaches actually consider a restricted problem by setting one coefficient to a constant.Second, the empirical AUC is piecewise-constant and standard gradient-based computational algorithms are not applicable.Existing methods maximize kernel-smoothed AUC instead, but they can be sensitive to bandwidth choice.In this article, we tackle these challenges by developing a new empirical AUC maximization method.Computationally efficient algorithms are provided for both the point and variance estimation of the estimated combination coefficients.Simulation studies show good computational and statistical performance of the proposed methods.An illustration is provided with a clinical application.","journal":"Statistica Sinica","year":2025,"id":561416,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9514,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":485174,"name":"Yijian Huang","orcid":"0000-0003-4364-3199","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1463511,"name":"Yuxuan Chen","orcid":"0000-0003-1977-3241","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:55:58.259104Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}