Related papers: Anscombe's Model for Sequential Clinical Trials Re…
As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, researchers are reporting findings of randomized trials comparing standard care with care augmented by experimental drugs. The trials have small sample sizes, so estimates of treatment effects are…
Doctors use statistics to advance medical knowledge; we use a medical analogy to introduce statistical inference "from scratch" and to highlight an improvement. Your doctor, perhaps implicitly, predicts the effectiveness of a treatment for…
The sequential treatment decisions made by physicians to treat chronic diseases are formalized in the statistical literature as dynamic treatment regimes. To date, methods for dynamic treatment regimes have been developed under the…
Randomization is a common technique used in clinical trials to eliminate potential bias and confounders in a patient population. Equal allocation to treatment groups is the standard due to its optimal efficiency in many cases. However, in…
Assuming that data are collected sequentially from independent streams, we consider the simultaneous testing of multiple binary hypotheses under two general setups; when the number of signals (correct alternatives) is known in advance, and…
Traditional statistical inference in cluster randomized trials typically invokes the asymptotic theory that requires the number of clusters to approach infinity. In this article, we propose an alternative conformal causal inference…
Many applied decision-making problems have a dynamic component: The policymaker needs not only to choose whom to treat, but also when to start which treatment. For example, a medical doctor may choose between postponing treatment (watchful…
We consider the problem of sequential evaluation, in which an evaluator observes candidates in a sequence and assigns scores to these candidates in an online, irrevocable fashion. Motivated by the psychology literature that has studied…
A fundamental principle of clinical medicine is that a treatment should only be administered to those patients who would benefit from it. Treatment strategies that assign treatment to patients as a function of their individual…
Effective decision making from randomised controlled clinical trials relies on robust interpretation of the numerical results. However, the language we use to describe clinical trials can cause confusion both in trial design and in…
To make decisions organisms often accumulate information across multiple timescales. However, most experimental and modeling studies of decision-making focus on sequences of independent trials. On the other hand, natural environments are…
Dynamic treatment regimes are sequential decision rules that adapt treatment according to individual time-varying characteristics and outcomes to achieve optimal effects, with applications in precision medicine, personalized…
We introduce a new multiple type I error criterion for clinical trials with multiple populations. Such trials are of interest in precision medicine where the goal is to develop treatments that are targeted to specific sub-populations…
Historical data about disease outcomes can be integrated into the analysis of clinical trials in many ways. We build on existing literature that uses prognostic scores from a predictive model to increase the efficiency of treatment effect…
We consider the problem of sequential anomaly identification over multiple independent data streams, under the presence of a sampling constraint. The goal is to quickly identify those that exhibit anomalous statistical behavior, when it is…
Randomized trials typically estimate average relative treatment effects, but decisions on the benefit of a treatment are possibly better informed by more individualized predictions of the absolute treatment effect. In case of a binary…
This paper presents the link between stochastic approximation and clinical trials based on randomized urn models investigated in Bai and Hu (1999,2005) and Bai, Hu and Shen (2002). We reformulate the dynamics of both the urn composition and…
Consider a setup in which a decision maker is informed about the population by a finite sample and based on that sample has to decide whether or not to apply a certain treatment. We work out finite sample minimax regret treatment rules…
There has been significant attention given to developing data-driven methods for tailoring patient care based on individual patient characteristics. Dynamic treatment regimes formalize this through a sequence of decision rules that map…
A common concern when a policymaker draws causal inferences from and makes decisions based on observational data is that the measured covariates are insufficiently rich to account for all sources of confounding, i.e., the standard no…