RIbench

The provided benchmark suite enables the automated evaluation and comparison of any existing and novel indirect method for reference interval ('RI') estimation in a systematic way. Indirect methods take routine measurements of diagnostic tests, containing pathological and non-pathological samples as input and use sophisticated statistical methods to derive a model describing the distribution of the non-pathological samples, which can then be used to derive reference intervals. The benchmark suite contains 5,760 simulated test sets with varying difficulty. To include any indirect method, a custom wrapper function needs to be provided. The package offers functions for generating the test sets, executing the indirect method and evaluating the results. See ?RIbench or vignette("RIbench_package") for a more comprehensive description of the features. A detailed description and application is described in Ammer T., Schuetzenmeister A., Prokosch H.-U., Zierk J., Rank C.M., Rauh M. "RIbench: A Proposed Benchmark for the Standardized Evaluation of Indirect Methods for Reference Interval Estimation". Clinical Chemistry (2022) doi:10.1093/clinchem/hvac142.