Personalizing Disease Prevention: Statistical Challenges

• Activity Number: 624
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 3, 2016 : 4:45 PM to 6:15 PM
• Sponsor: Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies
• Author(s): Alice S. Whittemore*
• Companies: Stanford University School of Medicine

Abstract

The recent presidential allocation of US resources for precision medicine reflects a national focus on personalized health care. Patients and their doctors are increasingly basing such care on statistical risk models that use a person's lifestyle and genetic covariates to assign him or her a probability of developing a disease or other adverse health outcome in a given future time period. The use of such personal risk models will increase as we learn more about the genetic and epigenetic causes of disease, and as the routine sequencing of peoples' entire genomes becomes practical. In this talk I will describe some of the statistical problems that arise when evaluating the accuracy and utility of these models. These problems would have interested Sir Ronald A. Fisher, who did much of his seminal statistical work while serving as the Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge.