Youden's Index and the Weight of Evidence

Summary

By means of Shannon’s relationship between information and probability, Youden’s index for rating diagnostic tests is shown to be a probability-scale analogue of the log-likelihood ratio of a positive test outcome.

Keywords

Youden’s index - log-likelihood ratio - Bayes’ theorem - diagnostic test

• References

• 1 Zhou XH. Obuchowski NA, McClish DK. Statistical Methods in Diagnostic Medicine. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. 2011
• 2 Youden WJ. Index for rating diagnostic tests. Cancer 1950; 3: 32-35.
• 3 Good IJ. Studies in the history of probability and statistics. XXXVII. A.M. Turing’s statistical work in World War II. Biometrika 1979; 66: 393-396.
• 4 Zabell S. Commentary on Alan M. Turing: The applications of probability to cryptography. Cryptologia 2012; 36: 191-214.
• 5 Shannon CE. 1948. A mathematical theory of communication. Bell Syst Tech J 1948; 27: 632-656. 379-423.
• 6 Good IJ. Weight of evidence: A brief survey. In. Bernardo JM, DeGroot MH, Lindley DV, Smith AFM. editors. Bayesian Statistics 2. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier Science Publishers BV (North Holland); 1985: 249-270.
• 7 Van den Ende J, Bisoffi Z, Van Puymbroek H, Van der Stuyft P, Van Gompel A, Derese A, Lynen L, Moreira J, Janssen PAJ. Bridging the gap between clinical practice and diagnostic clinical epidemiology: Pilot experiences with a didactic model based on a logarithmic scale. J Eval Clin Pract 2007; 13: 374-380.
• 8 Le CT. A solution for the most basic optimization problem associated with an ROC curve. Stat Methods Med Res 2006; 15: 571-584.
• 9 Reibnegger G, Schrabmair W. Optimum binary cut-off threshold of a diagnostic test: comparison of different methods using Monte Carlo technique. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak 2014; 14: 99 doi:10.1186/s12911–014–0099–1.
• 10 Cui L, Zhang X, Ye G, Zheng T, Song H, Deng H, Xiao B, Xia T, Yu X, Le Y, Guo J. Gastric juice microRNAs as potential biomarkers for the screening of gastric cancer. Cancer 2013; 119: 1618-1626.