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20.1: Area under the curve

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    45270
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    Introduction

    Area under the curve, AUC, represents the total change in \(y\) given change in \(x\). For example, if \(x\) is time, and \(y\) is oxygen consumption, an AUC would be appropriate to quantify the total oxygen consumption following strenuous exercise (Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, EPOC) or following a large meal (Specific Dynamic Action, SDA).

    In biostatistics, area under the relative (receiver) operating carrier, AUROC, shows characteristics of a diagnostic model, a graphic used to show tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity. Classifier performance. Used to find the appropriate cut-off. Plot true positive rates against false positive rates as cumulative functions, shows the relationship between sensitivity and specificity for every possible cut off value. Can then calculate AUC to get a measure of the intervention’s ability to discriminate between true and false positive rates.

    edit

    Related, area under precision-recall curve, AUPRC,

    estimate area (1) trapezoid method, (2) average precision score

    Area under the curve

    Download and install R package MESS; requires geepack, geeM, and Matrix packages

    R code

    x <- seq(1:10) 
    y <- c(1,4,5,2,11,22,9,7,5,1) 
    #length(x)==length(y)
    #smooth the data 
    loxy <- loess(y~x)
    #Make a plot (Fig. 20.1.1)
    plot(x,y, pch=19, cex=2, col="blue") 
    lines(predict(loxy), type="l", col="red")

    where == is an R comparison operator.

    Plot of data points for y vs x, with a curve of best fit included.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Area under the curve example.
    library(MESS) 
    auc(x,y,from=0,rule=2) 
    auc(x,loxy$fitted,from=0,rule=2)

    And R output

    #area under curve for raw data
    [1] 67
    #area under curve for smoothed data
    [1] 66.77616

    Area under the receiver operating carrier curve

    Download and install ROCR

    R code

    #modified from https://rviews.rstudio.com/2019/03/01/some-r-packages-for-roc-curves/

    library(ROCR)
    data(ROCR.simple) 
    df <- data.frame(ROCR.simple) 
    pred <- prediction(df$predictions, df$labels) 
    perf <- performance(pred,"tpr","fpr") 
    plot(perf,colorize=TRUE)

    R output:

    Line plot of true positive rate (on the left axis) vs false positive rate (on the bottom axis). The line is color-coded according to the color key for AUC values on the right axis; AUC values change from 0.01 at true and false positive rates of 1,1 to 1 at true and false positive rates of 0,0.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Example ROC curve.

    The right-hand axes is color codes by AUC values: good tests AUC between 0.8 and 0.9, very good tests greater than 0.9.

    Area under the precision recall curve

    — under construction

    Questions

    [pending]


    This page titled 20.1: Area under the curve is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Michael R Dohm via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.

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