email: eminus@uw.edu

I am an MS Thesis student in the Department of Biostatistics. My MS thesis research focuses on investigating the behavior of AUC as a performance metric in the rare event setting via simulation studies. Some literature has suggested that AUC may be an inaccurate or unstable when the event rate is very small. However, there is also some question as to if a small number of events is the driver of poor AUC performance or if the driver is truly a small number of events. Conducting simulations with differing event rates, methods, and training set sizes allows us to address this question and investigate if certain analytic techniques can help guard against undesirable behavior.