{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/estimating-the-optimal-linear-combination-of","title":"Estimating the Optimal Linear Combination of Biomarkers using Spherically Constrained Optimization","arxiv_id":"1909.04024","date":"2019-09-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Priyam Das","Debsurya De","Raju Maiti","Mona Kamal","Katherine A. Hutcheson","Clifton D. Fuller","Bibhas Chakraborty","Christine B. Peterson"],"abstract":"In the context of a binary classification problem, the optimal linear combination of continuous predictors can be estimated by maximizing an empirical estimate of the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). For multi-category responses, the optimal predictor combination can similarly be obtained by maximization of the empirical hypervolume under the manifold (HUM). This problem is particularly relevant to medical research, where it may be of interest to diagnose a disease with various subtypes or predict a multi-category outcome. Since the empirical HUM is discontinuous, non-differentiable, and possibly multi-modal, solving this maximization problem requires a global optimization technique. Estimation of the optimal coefficient vector using existing global optimization techniques is computationally expensive, becoming prohibitive as the number of predictors and the number of outcome categories increases. We propose an efficient derivative-free black-box optimization technique based on pattern search to solve this problem. Through extensive simulation studies, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance compared to existing methods including the step-down algorithm. Finally, we illustrate the proposed method to predict swallowing difficulty after radiation therapy for oropharyngeal cancer based on radiation dose to various structures in the head and neck.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.04024v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.04024v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"estimating-the-optimal-linear-combination-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/priyamdas2/SCOR","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1909.04024","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}