The backbone of medical decision making is prediction. Statistical prediction models can help in medical decision making. This book takes the viewpoint of the single patient and asks what does it mean that a risk prediction model performs well for a single individual?

Medical Risk Prediction Models: With Ties to Machine Learning is a hands-on book for clinicians, epidemiologists, and professional statisticians who need to make or evaluate a statistical prediction model based on data. The subject of the book is the patient’s individualized probability of a medical event within a given time horizon. Gerds and Kattan describe the mathematical details of making and evaluating a statistical prediction model in a highly pedagogical manner while avoiding mathematical notation. Read this book when you are in doubt about whether a Cox regression model predicts better than a random survival forest.

Features:

• All you need to know to correctly make an online risk calculator from scratch
• Discrimination, calibration, and predictive performance with censored data and competing risks
• R-code and illustrative examples
• Interpretation of prediction performance via benchmarks
• Comparison and combination of rival modeling strategies via cross-validation

Thomas A. Gerds is a professor at the Biostatistics Unit at the University of Copenhagen and is affiliated with the Danish Heart Foundation. He is the author of several R-packages on CRAN and has taught statistics courses to non-statisticians for many years.

Michael W. Kattan is a highly cited author and Chair of the Department of Quantitative Health Sciences at Cleveland Clinic. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and has received two awards from the Society for Medical Decision Making: the Eugene L. Saenger Award for Distinguished Service, and the John M. Eisenberg Award for Practical Application of Medical Decision-Making Research.