The area under the disease progress stairs: calculation, advantage, and application

Area of Science:

• * Plant Pathology
• * Agricultural Science
• * Biostatistics

Background:

• * The area under the disease progress curve (AUDPC) is a common metric for summarizing disease development over time.
• * AUDPC may inaccurately represent disease progress due to underestimation of initial and final disease assessments.
• * Improved methods are needed for accurate quantification of disease progress in agricultural trials.

Purpose of the Study:

• * To introduce and evaluate a novel formula, the area under the disease progress stairs (AUDPS), for disease progress assessment.
• * To compare the performance of AUDPS against the traditional AUDPC method.
• * To provide a more accurate and reliable method for analyzing disease progress data.

Main Methods:

• * Development of the AUDPS formula, which assigns more optimal weights to the first and last disease observations.
• * Comparative analysis of AUDPS and AUDPC using real-world disease progress data from various trials.
• * Evaluation of the precision and accuracy of both methods under different variance conditions.

Main Results:

• * The AUDPS approach generally provides a superior estimation of disease progress compared to AUDPC.
• * AUDPS demonstrated better performance across most tested agricultural trials.
• * AUDPC was found to be potentially more precise only when initial or final disease assessments exhibited large variances.

Conclusions:

• * The area under the disease progress stairs (AUDPS) offers a more accurate method for quantifying disease progress than AUDPC.
• * AUDPS, along with its standardized (sAUDPS) and relative (rAUDPS) forms, is recommended for analyzing disease progress experiments.
• * This new method enhances the reliability of disease progress data interpretation in agricultural research.