Strategies for informed sample size reduction in adaptive controlled clinical trials
Date
30/10/2017Author
Keywords
Metadata
Show full item recordAltmetrics Handle Statistics
Altmetrics DOI Statistics
Abstract
Clinical trial adaptation refers to any adjustment of the trial protocol after the onset of the trial. The main goal is to make the process of introducing new medical interventions to patients more efficient. The principal challenge, which is an outstanding research problem, is to be found in the question of how adaptation should be performed so as to minimize the chance of distorting the outcome of the trial. In this paper, we propose a novel method for achieving this. Unlike most of the previously published work, our approach focuses on trial adaptation by sample size adjustment, i.e. by reducing the number of trial participants in a statistically informed manner. Our key idea is to select the sample subset for removal in a manner which minimizes the associated loss of information. We formalize this notion and describe three algorithms which approach the problem in different ways, respectively, using (i) repeated random draws, (ii) a genetic algorithm, and (iii) what we term pair-wise sample compatibilities. Experiments on simulated data demonstrate the effectiveness of all three approaches, with a consistently superior performance exhibited by the pair-wise sample compatibilities-based method.
Citation
Arandelovic , O 2017 , ' Strategies for informed sample size reduction in adaptive controlled clinical trials ' , EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing . https://doi.org/10.1186/s13634-017-0510-z
Publication
EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1687-6180Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
Special issue on Biomedical Informatics with Optimization and Machine LearningCollections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.