Jackknife empirical likelihood for the difference of two volumes under ROC surfaces

The volume under a surface (VUS) is an effective measure for evaluating the discriminating power of a diagnostic test with three ordinal diagnostic groups. In this paper, we investigate the difference of two correlated VUS's to compare two treatments for discrimination of three-class classification data. A jackknife empirical likelihood (JEL) procedure is employed to avoid the variance estimation in the existing methods. We prove that the limiting distribution of the empirical log-likelihood ratio statistic follows a distribution. Extensive numerical studies show that the JEL confidence intervals outperform those based on the normal approximation method. The proposed method is also applied to the Alzheimer's disease data.