BACKGROUND A verbal autopsy (VA) is an interview conducted with the caregivers of someone who has recently died to describe the circumstances of the death. In recent years, several algorithmic methods have been developed to classify cause of death using VA data. The performance of one method-InSilicoVA-was evaluated in a study by Flaxman et al., published in BMC Medicine in 2018. The results of that study are different from those previously published by our group. METHODS Based on the description of methods in the Flaxman et al. study, we attempt to replicate the analysis to understand why the published results differ from those of our previous work. RESULTS We failed to reproduce the results published in Flaxman et al. Most of the discrepancies we find likely result from undocumented differences in data pre-processing, and/or values assigned to key parameters governing the behavior of the algorithm. CONCLUSION This finding highlights the importance of making replication code available along with published results. All code necessary to replicate the work described here is freely available on GitHub.

中文翻译：

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Flaxman 等人的“InSilicoVA 将死亡原因分配给口头尸检的性能：使用临床诊断黄金标准的多站点验证研究”的非确认复制。


背景技术 口头尸检（VA）是对最近去世的人的照顾者进行的访谈，以描述死亡情况。近年来，已经开发了几种算法方法来使用 VA 数据对死因进行分类。 Flaxman 等人于 2018 年发表在 BMC Medicine 上的一项研究评估了 InSilicoVA 方法的性能。该研究的结果与我们小组之前发表的结果不同。方法 基于 Flaxman 等人中方法的描述。研究中，我们尝试重复分析，以了解为什么发表的结果与我们之前的工作不同。结果我们未能重现 Flaxman 等人发表的结果。我们发现的大多数差异可能是由于数据预处理中未记录的差异和/或分配给控制算法行为的关键参数的值造成的。结论 这一发现强调了提供复制代码以及已发布结果的重要性。复制此处描述的工作所需的所有代码都可以在 GitHub 上免费获得。