No need for a gold-standard test: on the mining of diagnostic test performance indices merely based on the distribution of the test value.

Background: Diagnostic tests are important in clinical medicine. To determine the test performance indices - test sensitivity, specificity, likelihood ratio, predictive values, etc. - the test results should be compared against a gold-standard test.

On the information hidden in a classifier distribution.

Classification tasks are a common challenge to every field of science. To correctly interpret the results provided by a classifier, we need to know the performance indices of the classifier including its sensitivity, specificity, the most appropriate cut-off value (for continuous classifiers), etc. Typically, several studies should be conducted to find all these indices.