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Seminar: Ruth Pfeiffer, Building and Validating Risk Models for Clinical and Public Health Applications

Mar 20, 2023 - 11:00 AM
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Speaker: Ruth Pfeiffer, Senior Investigator, National Cancer Institute

Title: Building and Validating Risk Models for Clinical and Public Health Applications

Abstract: Statistical models that predict disease incidence, disease recurrence, or mortality following disease onset have broad public health and clinical applications. Of great importance are models that predict absolute risk (also called ‘cumulative incidence’ or ‘crude risk’), the probability that an individual who is free of a given disease at an initial age, a, will develop that disease in the subsequent interval (a, t]. Absolute risk is reduced by mortality from competing risks. I will discuss approaches to building risk models and then address validating a risk model in an external cohort. Model validation is an important step before a risk prediction model can be recommended for applications. The specific problem I address is model validation when not all predictor variables in the model are available on all members in the validation cohort. Missingness can be random or by design (e.g. covariate information is available only in case-cohort and nested case-control samples).  I will present new methods to deal with such missingness when assessing calibration of estimates of absolute risk