A ROC‐based test for evaluating the group difference with an application to neonatal audiology screening

This article proposes a powerful method to compare two samples. The proposed method handles comparison of data by drawing inference from ROC curve model parameters. The method estimates parameters from a linear model framework on the empirical sensitivities and specificities. The consistent ROC parameters are then used to give a more powerful test than existing methods in several situations. In addition, we present a comprehensive statistic based on the Cauchy combination, which works well in all scenarios considered in this article. We also offer an efficient one‐layer wild permutation procedure to calculate the P‐value of our statistic. The method is particularly useful when the underlying continuous biomarker results are non‐normal. We illustrate the proposed methods in a neonatal audiology diagnostic example.