Stage-Wise Bayesian Adaptive Designs for Clinical Trials

• Activity Number: 408
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Bayesian Statistical Science
• Author(s): Yi Cheng*+
• Companies: Indiana University South Bend
• Keywords: Bayesian ; adaptive design ; Clinical Trials ; decision theoretical approaches ; interim analysis ; Stage-Wise

Abstract

A Bayesian adaptive design is proposed for a comparative two-armed clinical trial using decision theoretical approaches. A loss function is specified to consider the cost for each patient, as wellas the costs of making incorrect decisions. At each interim analysis, the decision whether to terminate the trial is based on the expected loss under the posterior distributions. The number of interim analyses is not pre-fixed but decided adaptively by the observed data. The connection between the design parameter and the classical error rates is studied. Numerical studies are carried out to compare the proposed design with existing ones. The design is general enough to accommodate both continuous and discrete types of data.