Combining several ordinal measures in clinical studies

Knut M. Wittkowski, Edmund Lee, Rachel Nussbaum, Francesca N. Chamian, James G. Krueger
2004 Statistics in Medicine  
In medical research, it is rare that a single variable is su cient to represent all relevant aspects of epidemiological risk, genomic activity, adverse events, or clinical response. Since biological systems tend to be neither linear, nor hierarchical in nature, the assumptions of traditional multivariate statistical methods based on the linear model can often not be justiÿed on theoretical grounds. Establishing concept validity through empirical validation is not only problematic, but also time
more » ... consuming. This paper proposes the use of u-statistics for scoring multivariate ordinal data and a family of simple nonparametric tests for analysis. The scoring method is demonstrated to be applicable to scoring clinical response proÿles in the treatment of psoriasis and then to identifying genomic pathways that best correlate with these proÿles.
doi:10.1002/sim.1778 pmid:15122738 fatcat:5563jyonijdjrcrp5xkn4rpcg4