Resumen de Inference for the overlap coefficient based on P-splines and Dirichlet process mixtures

Javier E. Garrido Guillén, Vanda Inácio , María Xosé Rodríguez Álvarez

• Accurate diagnosis of disease is of great importance in clinical practice and medical research. Before a diagnostic test is routinely used in practice its ability to discriminate between diseased and nondiseased states must be rigorously assessed. Further, its performance may depend on covariates (e.g., age and/or gender). This motivates us to propose the covariate-specific overlap coefficient, which will help to determine the optimal populations where to perform the tests on. We assume a location-scale regression model for the test outcomes in each group, relying on an additive formulation based on Penalised splines, while the regression error follows a Dirichlet process mixture of normal distributions. Our approach is illustrated through an application concerning diagnosis of diabetes.