Related papers: The implications of outcome truncation in reproduc…
Continuous outcome measurements truncated by death present a challenge for the estimation of unbiased treatment effects in randomized controlled trials (RCTs). One way to deal with such situations is to estimate the survivor average causal…
It is common that in multiarm randomized trials, the outcome of interest is "truncated by death," meaning that it is only observed or well defined conditioning on an intermediate outcome. In this case, in addition to pairwise contrasts, the…
Patient-centered outcomes, such as quality of life and length of hospital stay, are the focus in a wide array of clinical studies. However, participants in randomized trials for elderly or critically and severely ill patient populations may…
The micro-randomized trial (MRT) is an experimental design that can be used to develop optimal mobile health interventions. In MRTs, interventions in the form of notifications or messages are sent through smart phones to individuals,…
Cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) on fragile populations frequently encounter complex attrition problems where the reasons for missing outcomes can be heterogeneous, with participants who are known alive, known to have died, or with unknown…
The primary outcome of Randomized clinical Trials (RCTs) are typically dichotomous, continuous, multivariate continuous, or time-to-event. However, what if this outcome is unstructured, e.g., a list of variables of mixed types, longitudinal…
Human understanding of randomness and variation is shaped by a number of cognitive biases. Here we relate a lesser-known cognitive bias, the "outcome orientation", to medical questions and describe the harm that the outcome orientation can…
Across domains such as medicine, employment, and criminal justice, predictive models often target labels that imperfectly reflect the outcomes of interest to experts and policymakers. For example, clinical risk assessments deployed to…
Methods for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) from observational data have largely focused on continuous or binary outcomes, with less attention paid to survival outcomes and almost none to settings with competing risks. In…
Randomised controlled trials aim to assess the impact of one (or more) health interventions relative to other standard interventions. RCTs sometimes use an ordinal outcome, which is an endpoint that comprises of multiple, monotonically…
A key aspect of patient-focused drug development is identifying and measuring outcomes that are important to patients in clinical trials. Many medical conditions affect multiple symptom domains, and a consensus approach to determine the…
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) may suffer from limited scope. In particular, samples may be unrepresentative: some RCTs over- or under- sample individuals with certain characteristics compared to the target population, for which one…
In some randomized clinical trials, patients may die before the measurements of their outcomes. Even though randomization generates comparable treatment and control groups, the remaining survivors often differ significantly in background…
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) are the current gold standards to empirically measure the effect of a new drug. However, they may be of limited size and resorting to complementary non-randomized data, referred to as observational, is…
The Regression Discontinuity (RD) design is a quasi-experimental design which emulates a randomised study by exploiting situations where treatment is assigned according to a continuous variable as is common in many drug treatment…
Sample size calculations can be challenging with skewed continuous outcomes in randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Standard t-test-based calculations may require data transformation, which may be difficult before data collection.…
Clinical transfusion-outcomes research faces unique methodological challenges compared with other areas of clinical research. These challenges arise because patients frequently receive multiple transfusions, each unit originates from a…
The finite sensitivity of instruments or detection methods means that data sets in many areas of astronomy, for example cosmological or exoplanet surveys, are necessarily systematically incomplete. Such data sets, where the population being…
The analysis of causal effects when the outcome of interest is possibly truncated by death has a long history in statistics and causal inference. The survivor average causal effect is commonly identified with more assumptions than those…
Comparative binary outcome data are of fundamental interest in statistics and are often pooled in meta-analyses. Here we examine the simplest case where for each study there are two patient groups and a binary event of interest, giving rise…