Using ordinal outcomes to construct and select biomarker combinations for single-level prediction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Biomarker studies may involve an ordinal outcome, such as no, mild, or severe disease. There is often interest in predicting one particular level of the outcome due to its clinical significance. METHODS: A simple approach to constructing biomarker combinations in this context involves dichotomizing the outcome and using a binary logistic regression model. We assessed whether more sophisticated methods offer advantages over this simple approach. It is often necessary to select among several candidate biomarker combinations. One strategy involves selecting a combination based on its ability to predict the outcome level of interest. We propose an algorithm that leverages the ordinal outcome to inform combination selection. We apply this algorithm to data from a study of acute kidney injury after cardiac surgery, where kidney injury may be absent, mild, or severe. RESULTS: Using more sophisticated modeling approaches to construct combinations provided gains over the simple binary logistic regression approach in specific settings. In the examples considered, the proposed algorithm for combination selection tended to reduce the impact of bias due to selection and to provide combinations with improved performance. CONCLUSIONS: Methods that utilize the ordinal nature of the outcome in the construction and/or selection of biomarker combinations have the potential to yield better combinations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".