A Novel Health Metric Based on Biomarkers /

In section 2 we introduce the health measure; in section 3 we validate versions of the health measure through the link with self-reported health which is another commonly used measure of general health; in section 4 we illustrate the health measure in two applications; nally we conclude in section 5. 2. Health metric 2.1. [...] Mahalanobis explained the distance in parallels with the Galilean transformation, a standard method in physics that maps all coordinates into a frame of reference and thus ensures comparability between the objects; and indeed the distance is a composition of the Euclidean distance and the trans- formation T (x). [...] Additionally, the Mahalanobis distance can become unreliable when the scales of the variables di¤er; we thus standardize each biomarker with respect to the mean and standard deviation of the reference group. [...] We validate this by varying the number of biomarkers included in the calculation of DM : in each di¤erent case we validate the signal of health through the link of DM with self-reported health. [...] Hence the standardization in the de nition of HO i in (3.1) is necessary because the scale of DM changes with the number of biomarkers included.