Response-adaptive designs in clinical trials for targeting the best treatment: an overview

Keywords

Statistical learning
Code:
38/2010
Title:
Response-adaptive designs in clinical trials for targeting the best treatment: an overview
Date:
Monday 15th November 2010
Author(s):
Flournoy, N.; May, C.; Secchi, P.
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Abstract:
Response-adaptive designs are increasingly being implemented in clinical trials, particularly early phase trials, and they have increasingly stimulated the work of researchers. This paper reviews a particular class of response-adaptive designs, which have a di fferent property from the most adaptive designs in literature. These are response-adaptive designs targeting asymptotically the superior response, that is, treating with the superior treatment with probability converging to one. The model underlying such designs is a randomly reinforced urn. In the context of clinical trials, this prop- erty is particularly attractive from an ethical point of view. This overview starts from the early paper of [8] until the recent work by [9].