DTR: An R Package for Estimation and Comparison of Dynamic Treatment Regimes

• Activity Number: 248
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 4, 2014 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Computing
• Author(s): Xinyu Tang*+ and Maria Melguizo
• Companies: University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
• Keywords: adaptive treatment strategy ; dynamic treatment regime ; inverse weighting ; survival analysis ; sequentially randomized design ; treatment sequence

Abstract

Sequentially randomized designs are widely used in biomedical research, particularly in clinical trials, to assess and compare the effects of various treatment sequences. The advantage of such design is that it allows the investigator to study various treatment sequences where the patients' second-stage therapies can be adjusted based on their responses to the first-stage therapies. Although we have seen considerable advancement in the development of statistical methods for estimating and comparing the effects of treatment sequences on survival outcomes, no statistical package has been developed to implement those newly-proposed statistical approaches. Therefore, we developed the R package entitled DTR with a set of functions that can be used to estimate and compare the effects of different treatment sequences using the newly-proposed statistical approaches.