Related papers: Misplaced Confidence in Observed Power
While the HVTN 505 trial showed no overall efficacy of the tested vaccine to prevent HIV infection over placebo, previous studies, biological theories, and the finding that immune response markers strongly correlated with infection in…
Heterogeneous treatment effects can be very important in the analysis of randomized clinical trials. Heightened risks or enhanced benefits may exist for particular subsets of study subjects. When the heterogeneous treatment effects are…
To leverage peer influence and increase population behavioral changes, behavioral interventions often rely on peer-based strategies. A common study design that assesses such strategies is the egocentric-network randomized trial (ENRT), in…
Unblinded sample size re-estimation (SSR) is often planned in a clinical trial when there is large uncertainty about the true treatment effect. For Proof-of Concept (PoC) in a Phase II dose finding study, contrast test can be adopted to…
Survival outcomes are common in comparative effectiveness studies and require unique handling because they are usually incompletely observed due to right-censoring. A ``once for all'' approach for causal inference with survival outcomes…
Measuring treatment efficacy in mixture of subgroups from a randomized clinical trial is a fundamental problem in personalized medicine development, in deciding whether to treat the entire patient population or to target a subgroup. We show…
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) represent a gold standard when developing policy guidelines. However, RCTs are often narrow, and lack data on broader populations of interest. Causal effects in these populations are often estimated using…
Two-sample summary-data Mendelian randomization (MR) has become a popular research design to estimate the causal effect of risk exposures. With the sample size of GWAS continuing to increase, it is now possible to utilize genetic…
A test of the null hypothesis that a hazard rate is monotone nondecreasing, versus the alternative that it is not, is proposed. Both the test statistic and the means of calibrating it are new. Unlike previous approaches, neither is based on…
This paper studies off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning with a focus on behavior policy estimation for importance sampling. Prior work has shown empirically that estimating a history-dependent behavior policy can lead to…
Systemic risk is the risk that a company- or industry-level risk could trigger a huge collapse of another or even the whole institution. Various systemic risk measures have been proposed in the literature to quantify the domino and…
It is known that the hazard ratio lacks a useful causal interpretation. Even for data from a randomized controlled trial, the hazard ratio suffers from built-in selection bias as, over time, the individuals at risk in the exposed and…
Background: The hazard ratio of the Cox proportional hazards model is widely used in randomized controlled trials to assess treatment effects. However, two properties of the hazard ratio including the non-collapsibility and built-in…
The log-rank test and the Cox proportional hazards model are commonly used to compare time-to-event data in clinical trials, as they are most powerful under proportional hazards. But there is a loss of power if this assumption is violated,…
Consider a finite sample from an unknown distribution over a countable alphabet. Unobserved events are alphabet symbols which do not appear in the sample. Estimating the probabilities of unobserved events is a basic problem in statistics…
In oncology, conduct well-powered time-to-event randomized clinical trials may be challenging due to limited patietns number. Many designs for single-arm trials (SATs) have recently emerged as an alternative to overcome this issue. They…
What can be considered an appropriate statistical method for the primary analysis of a randomized clinical trial (RCT) with a time-to-event endpoint when we anticipate non-proportional hazards owing to a delayed effect? This question has…
I revisit the standard moral-hazard model, in which an agent's preference over contracts is rooted in costly effort choice. I characterise the behavioural content of the model in terms of empirically testable axioms, and show that the…
Subgroup analyses within randomized controlled trials are often underpowered due to limited sample sizes. We address this challenge by leveraging trial participants outside the subgroup of interest to augment estimation within the subgroup.…
Epileptiform activity (EA) is associated with worse outcomes including increased risk of disability and death. However, the effect of EA on the neurologic outcome is confounded by the feedback between treatment with anti-seizure medications…