Assessment of Disagreement: A New Information-Based Approach

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2010

Authors

Cristina Costa Santos (Author) FMUP; Luis Antunes (Author) FCUP; Andre Souto (Author) Other; Joao Bernardes (Author) FMUP

Journal

Title: Annals of Epidemiology

Vol. 20 No. 8

Pages: 555-561

ISSN: 1047-2797

Publisher: Elsevier

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 26 Citations

Scopus - 26 Citations

Scientific classification

FOS: Medical and Health sciences > Health sciences

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-003-50R

DOI: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2010.02.011

Abstract (EN): PURPOSE: Disagreement on the interpretation of diagnostic tests and clinical decisions remains an important problem in medicine. As no strategy to assess agreement seems to be fail-safe to compare the degree of agreement, or disagreement, we propose a new information-based approach to assess disagreement. METHODS: The sum over all logarithms of possible outcomes of a variable is a valid measure of the amount of information contained in the variable. The proposed measure is based on the amount of information contained in the differences between two observations. This measure is normalized and satisfies the flowing properties: it is a metric, scaled invariant and it has differential weighting. RESULTS: Two real examples and a simulation were used to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed measure to compare the degree of disagreement. CONCLUSIONS: Used as complement to the existing methods, we believe our approach can be useful to compare the degree of disagreement among different populations. Ann Epidemiol 2010;20:555-561.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 7