Let assume we have a set of measurements made with a novel instrument and we want to identify some that could be clinically meaningful between all the one we wave. This is a problem that I’m encountering often since the advent of “-omic” in medicine, especially in radiology.
Let assume I have a set of feature that describe my biological property. I want to identify the ones that could be the most clinically meaningful and I was thinking about the coefficient of variation. Using the CoV I should be able to have a measure that can compare all the different feature even if they have different mean or scale. I should discard feature with very high (for example >100%) or very low (for example <2%) variability, and keep the feature with an intermediate variability (let’s say between 10% and 30%). I suppose this kind of variability could be clinical useful in differentiating between healthy and pathological subjects, a too low variability can indicate that the feature is useless (for example a list of 1), the same for a too high variability (because I assume it is unreliable between every measurement). I couldn’t find any reference about this indicating if this is correct (and eventually the proposed cutoff) and if not why it’s a wrong assumption.
Does anybody have a reference about this kind of problem? What do you think?
Thank you very much
gma