Managing bias in ROC curves

Two modifications to the standard use of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for evaluating virtual screening methods are proposed. The first is to replace the linear plots usually used with semi-logarithmic ones (pROC plots), including when doing “area under the curve” (AUC) calculations. Doing so is a simple way to bias the statistic to favor identification of “hits” early in the recovery curve rather than late. A second suggested modification entails weighting each active based on the size of the lead series to which it belongs. Two weighting schemes are described: arithmetic, in which the weight for each active is inversely proportional to the size of the cluster from which it comes; and harmonic, in which weights are inversely proportional to the rank of each active within its class. Either scheme is able to distinguish biased from unbiased screening statistics, but the harmonically weighted AUC in particular emphasizes the ability to place representatives of each class of active early in the recovery curve.