Adaptation of the weighted Kaplan-Meier method to time-dependent ROC curves

Abstract

This study was aimed at adapting the weighted Kaplan-Meier method to time-dependent ROC curve analysis. The performances of these two time-dependent ROC curve methods were compared, in which the Kaplan-Meier estimator and weighted Kaplan-Meier estimator were used. An application was presented for pancreatic cancer patients to evaluate the prognostic ability of the CA19-9 antigen. A simulation study was performed for different scenarios to see the performance of the proposed method. In all situations, it is observed that the AUC values that were obtained by the weighted time-dependent ROC (WTDR) curves more closely approximated the real AUC values than the classical time-dependent ROC (TDR) curve method and has got smaller mean square error rates.