• Abraham D Flaxman, Riley Hazard, Ian Riley, Alan D Lopez, and MurrayChristopher J LCJLInstitute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, 2301 5th Avenue Suite 600, Seattle, WA, 98121, USA..
• Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, 2301 5th Avenue Suite 600, Seattle, WA, 98121, USA. abie@uw.edu.
• Bmc Med. 2020 Mar 26; 18 (1): 7373.

AbstractWe recently published in BMC Medicine an evaluation of the comparative diagnostic performance of InSilicoVA, a software to map the underlying causes of death from verbal autopsy interviews. The developers of this software claim to have failed to replicate our results and appear to have also failed to locate our replication archive for this work. In this Correspondence, we provide feedback on how this might have been done more usefully and offer some suggestions to improve future attempts at reproducible research. We also offer an alternative interpretation of the results presented by Li et al., namely that, out of 100 verbal autopsy interviews, InSilicoVA will, at best, correctly identify the underlying cause of death in 40 cases and incorrectly in 60 - a markedly inferior performance to alternative existing approaches.

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