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Main Authors: Jesse, David, Huber, Cynthia, Friede, Tim
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15607
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author Jesse, David
Huber, Cynthia
Friede, Tim
author_facet Jesse, David
Huber, Cynthia
Friede, Tim
contents The widely used proportional hazard assumption cannot be assessed reliably in small-scale clinical trials and might often in fact be unjustified, e.g. due to delayed treatment effects. An alternative to the hazard ratio as effect measure is the difference in restricted mean survival time (RMST) that does not rely on model assumptions. Although an asymptotic test for two-sample comparisons of the RMST exists, it has been shown to suffer from an inflated type I error rate in samples of small or moderate sizes. Recently, permutation tests, including the studentized permutation test, have been introduced to address this issue. In this paper, we propose two methods based on pseudo-observations (PO) regression models as alternatives for such scenarios and assess their properties in comparison to previously proposed approaches in an extensive simulation study. Furthermore, we apply the proposed PO methods to data from a clinical trail and, by doing so, point out some extension that might be very useful for practical applications such as covariate adjustments.
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publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Comparing restricted mean survival times in small sample clinical trials using pseudo-observations
Jesse, David
Huber, Cynthia
Friede, Tim
Methodology
The widely used proportional hazard assumption cannot be assessed reliably in small-scale clinical trials and might often in fact be unjustified, e.g. due to delayed treatment effects. An alternative to the hazard ratio as effect measure is the difference in restricted mean survival time (RMST) that does not rely on model assumptions. Although an asymptotic test for two-sample comparisons of the RMST exists, it has been shown to suffer from an inflated type I error rate in samples of small or moderate sizes. Recently, permutation tests, including the studentized permutation test, have been introduced to address this issue. In this paper, we propose two methods based on pseudo-observations (PO) regression models as alternatives for such scenarios and assess their properties in comparison to previously proposed approaches in an extensive simulation study. Furthermore, we apply the proposed PO methods to data from a clinical trail and, by doing so, point out some extension that might be very useful for practical applications such as covariate adjustments.
title Comparing restricted mean survival times in small sample clinical trials using pseudo-observations
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15607