# Predicting dichotomised outcomes from high-dimensional data in biomedicine

## TL;DR

The paper introduces a new method to better predict binary outcomes in biomedical data by combining logistic and linear regression, improving accuracy in high-dimensional settings.

## Contribution

A novel approach that combines logistic and linear regression predictions to enhance binary classification in high-dimensional biomedical data.

## Key findings

- Combining logistic and linear regression predictions significantly improves dichotomised outcome predictions in high-dimensional data.
- The method was validated using simulated and clinical data for predicting cognitive impairment.
- An R package called cornet implements the proposed approach and is publicly available.

## Abstract

In many biomedical applications, we are more interested in the predicted probability that a numerical outcome is above a threshold than in the predicted value of the outcome. For example, it might be known that antibody levels above a certain threshold provide immunity against a disease, or a threshold for a disease severity score might reflect conversion from the presymptomatic to the symptomatic disease stage. Accordingly, biomedical researchers often convert numerical to binary outcomes (loss of information) to conduct logistic regression (probabilistic interpretation). We address this bad statistical practice by modelling the binary outcome with logistic regression, modelling the numerical outcome with linear regression, transforming the predicted values from linear regression to predicted probabilities, and combining the predicted probabilities from logistic and linear regression. Analysing high-dimensional simulated and experimental data, namely clinical data for predicting cognitive impairment, we obtain significantly improved predictions of dichotomised outcomes. Thus, the proposed approach effectively combines binary with numerical outcomes to improve binary classification in high-dimensional settings. An implementation is available in the R package cornet on GitHub (https://github.com/rauschenberger/cornet) and CRAN (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=cornet).