Related papers: Leveraging external data in the analysis of random…
Two important considerations in clinical research studies are proper evaluations of internal and external validity. While randomized clinical trials can overcome several threats to internal validity, they may be prone to poor external…
In causal inference, the correct formulation of the scientific question of interest is a crucial step. Here we apply the estimand framework to a comparison of the outcomes of patient-level clinical trials and observational data to help…
When a new treatment is considered for use, whether a pharmaceutical drug or a search engine ranking algorithm, a typical question that arises is, will its performance exceed that of the current treatment? The conventional way to answer…
Prior information is often incorporated informally when planning a clinical trial. Here, we present an approach on how to incorporate prior information, such as data from historical clinical trials, into the nuisance parameter based sample…
From scientific experiments to online A/B testing, the previously observed data often affects how future experiments are performed, which in turn affects which data will be collected. Such adaptivity introduces complex correlations between…
While randomized trials may be the gold standard for evaluating the effectiveness of the treatment intervention, in some special circumstances, single-arm clinical trials utilizing external control may be considered. The causal treatment…
Subgroup analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) constitute an important component of the drug development process in precision medicine. In particular, subgroup analyses of early-stage trials often influence the design and…
Generalizability and transportability methods have been proposed to address the external validity bias of randomized clinical trials that results from differences in the distribution of treatment effect modifiers between trial and target…
With medical tests becoming increasingly available, concerns about over-testing and over-treatment dramatically increase. Hence, it is important to understand the influence of testing on treatment selection in general practice. Most…
Censored survival data are common in clinical trials, but small control groups can pose challenges, particularly in rare diseases or where balanced randomization is impractical. Recent approaches leverage external controls from historical…
Random effects meta-analysis is widely used for synthesizing studies under the assumption that underlying effects come from a normal distribution. However, under certain conditions the use of alternative distributions might be more…
Many clinical questions involve estimating the effects of multiple treatments using observational data. When using longitudinal data, the interest is often in the effect of treatment strategies that involve sustaining treatment over time.…
The heterogeneous treatment effect plays a crucial role in precision medicine.There is evidence that real-world data, even subject to biases, can be employed as supplementary evidence for randomized clinical trials to improve the…
Combining observational and experimental data for causal inference can improve treatment effect estimation. However, many observational data sets cannot be released due to data privacy considerations, so one researcher may not have access…
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…
The question of how individual patient data from cohort studies or historical clinical trials can be leveraged for designing more powerful, or smaller yet equally powerful, clinical trials becomes increasingly important in the era of…
In modern data analysis, information is frequently collected from multiple sources, often leading to challenges such as data heterogeneity and imbalanced sample sizes across datasets. Robust and efficient data integration methods are…
The use of historical controls offers a valuable alternative when traditional randomized controlled trials are not feasible. However, such approaches may introduce bias due to temporal changes in patient populations, diagnostic criteria,…
Every design choice will have different effects on different units. However traditional A/B tests are often underpowered to identify these heterogeneous effects. This is especially true when the set of unit-level attributes is…
Randomized clinical trials are the gold standard when estimating the average treatment effect. However, they are usually not a random sample from the real-world population because of the inclusion/exclusion rules. Meanwhile, observational…