摘要

In this article, we propose a separation curve method to identify the range of false positive rates for which two receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves differ or one ROC curve is superior to the other. Our method is based on a general multivariate ROC curve model, including interaction terms between discrete covariates and false positive rates. It is applicable with most existing ROC curve models. Furthermore, we introduce a semiparametric least squares ROC estimator and apply the estimator to the separation curve method. We derive a sandwich estimator for the covariance matrix of the semiparametric estimator. We illustrate the application of our separation curve method through two real life examples. The technical proofs, a dataset, and the computer code are available in the online supplementary materials.