max-accuracy-genetic-pred

Pre-symptomatic prediction of disease and drug response based on genetic testing is a critical component of personalized medicine. We mathematically derive the absolute limits that these factors impose on test accuracy in the absence of any distributional assumptions on risk. We present these limits in terms of the best-case receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve, consisting of the best-case test sensitivities and specificities, and the AUC (area under the curve) measure of accuracy. Knowledge of such limits is valuable in understanding the implications of genetic testing even before additional associations are identified. We provide code in the R statistical language and environment (www.r-project.org) and documentation to carry out the methods described in our paper: Dreyfuss, Levner, Galagan, Church, Ramoni. How accurate can genetic predictions be? BMC Genomics 2012, 13:340.