Statistics in medicine
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Statistics in medicine · Sep 2014
Step-up testing procedure for multiple comparisons with a control for a latent variable model with ordered categorical responses.
In clinical studies, multiple comparisons of several treatments to a control with ordered categorical responses are often encountered. A popular statistical approach to analyzing the data is to use the logistic regression model with the proportional odds assumption. As discussed in several recent research papers, if the proportional odds assumption fails to hold, the undesirable consequence of an inflated familywise type I error rate may affect the validity of the clinical findings. ⋯ A simulation study demonstrates the superiority of the proposed procedure to all existing testing procedures. Based on the proposed step-up procedure, we derive an algorithm that enables the determination of the total sample size and the sample size allocation scheme with a pre-determined level of test power before the onset of a clinical trial. A clinical example is presented to illustrate our proposed method.
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Statistics in medicine · Sep 2014
A design-by-treatment interaction model for network meta-analysis with random inconsistency effects.
Network meta-analysis is becoming more popular as a way to analyse multiple treatments simultaneously and, in the right circumstances, rank treatments. A difficulty in practice is the possibility of 'inconsistency' or 'incoherence', where direct evidence and indirect evidence are not in agreement. Here, we develop a random-effects implementation of the recently proposed design-by-treatment interaction model, using these random effects to model inconsistency and estimate the parameters of primary interest. ⋯ Our methods also facilitate the ranking of treatments under inconsistency. We derive R and I(2) statistics to quantify the impact of the between-study heterogeneity and the inconsistency. We apply our model to two examples.