Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Comment
. 2023 Jun;18(4):1239-1241.
doi: 10.1007/s11739-023-03247-2. Epub 2023 Mar 8.

Beware the IBM SPSS statistics® in multiple ROC curves analysis

Ahmad Sabry Saleh  1
Affiliations
Comment

Beware the IBM SPSS statistics® in multiple ROC curves analysis

Ahmad Sabry Saleh. Intern Emerg Med. 2023 Jun.
No abstract available

Keywords: COVID-19; Prognosis; ROC curve; Statistics.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The author declares that he has no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have influenced the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The IBM SPSS statistics “ROC Curve: Options” dialog. In the “Test Direction” area, the user must choose which direction is positive. Only curves with similar direction of association can be displayed properly in the same plot
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
ROC curves depicted by three statistical software for ferritin and lymphocytes which have different direction of association with mortality in patients with COVID-19. A larger value in ferritin indicates a positive test result (mortality) while a smaller value in lymphocytes indicates a positive test result (mortality). Curves are displayed properly in the same plot when depicted by Analyze-it® (A) and MedCalc® (B) with AUCs of 0.775 and 0.789, respectively. However, the IBM SPSS Statistics® (using the default test direction entry; “Larger test result indicates more positive test”) displayed the lymphocytes curve below the diagonal reference line with misleadingly small AUC of 0.211 (C). Transformation of lymphocytes (via multiplying all values by − 1) displayed the two curves properly in the same plot (D). Dataset analyzed includes 266 COVID-19 patients with paired measurements of ferritin and lymphocytes (online resource 1)  from reference [4]; an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment on

References

    1. Leidi F, Boari GEM, Scarano O, Mangili B, Gorla G, Corbani A, Accordini B, Napoli F, Ghidelli C, Archenti G, Turini D, Saottini M, Guarinoni V, Ferrari-Toninelli G, Manzoni F, Bonetti S, Chiarini G, Malerba P, Braglia-Orlandini F, Bianco G, Faustini C, Agabiti-Rosei C, De Ciuceis C, Rizzoni D. Comparison of the characteristics, morbidity and mortality of COVID-19 between first and second/third wave in a hospital setting in Lombardy: a retrospective cohort study. Intern Emerg Med. 2022;17(7):1941–1949. doi: 10.1007/s11739-022-03034-5. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Zweig MH, Campbell G. Receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) plots: a fundamental evaluation tool in clinical medicine. Clin Chem. 1993;39(4):561–577. doi: 10.1093/clinchem/39.4.561. - DOI - PubMed
    1. IBM (2022) IBM SPSS statistics algorithms. IBM Corporation. https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/SSLVMB_29.0.0/pdf/IBM_SPSS_Statistics_Algori.... Accessed 19 January 2023
    1. Sarkar A, Sanyal S, Majumdar A, Tewari DN, Bhattacharjee U, Pal J, Chakrabarti AK, Dutta S. Development of lab score system for predicting COVID-19 patient severity: a retrospective analysis. PLoS One. 2022;17(9):e0273006. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273006. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Coelho S, Braga AC (2015) Performance evaluation of two software for analysis through ROC curves: Comp2ROC vs SPSS. In: Gervasi O, Murgante B, Misra S et al. (eds) Computational science and its applications -- ICCSA 2015, vol 2. Springer International Publishing, Switzerland, p 144–156 doi:10.1007/978-3-319-21407-8_11

LinkOut - more resources