How many patients could we save with LLM priors?

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Arai, Shota, Selby, David, Vargo, Andrew, Vollmer, Sebastian
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866917095069974528
author Arai, Shota
Selby, David
Vargo, Andrew
Vollmer, Sebastian
author_facet Arai, Shota
Selby, David
Vargo, Andrew
Vollmer, Sebastian
contents Imagine a world where clinical trials need far fewer patients to achieve the same statistical power, thanks to the knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs). We present a novel framework for hierarchical Bayesian modeling of adverse events in multi-center clinical trials, leveraging LLM-informed prior distributions. Unlike data augmentation approaches that generate synthetic data points, our methodology directly obtains parametric priors from the model. Our approach systematically elicits informative priors for hyperparameters in hierarchical Bayesian models using a pre-trained LLM, enabling the incorporation of external clinical expertise directly into Bayesian safety modeling. Through comprehensive temperature sensitivity analysis and rigorous cross-validation on real-world clinical trial data, we demonstrate that LLM-derived priors consistently improve predictive performance compared to traditional meta-analytical approaches. This methodology paves the way for more efficient and expert-informed clinical trial design, enabling substantial reductions in the number of patients required to achieve robust safety assessment and with the potential to transform drug safety monitoring and regulatory decision making.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04250
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How many patients could we save with LLM priors?
Arai, Shota
Selby, David
Vargo, Andrew
Vollmer, Sebastian
Methodology
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
Information Retrieval
Applications
Imagine a world where clinical trials need far fewer patients to achieve the same statistical power, thanks to the knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs). We present a novel framework for hierarchical Bayesian modeling of adverse events in multi-center clinical trials, leveraging LLM-informed prior distributions. Unlike data augmentation approaches that generate synthetic data points, our methodology directly obtains parametric priors from the model. Our approach systematically elicits informative priors for hyperparameters in hierarchical Bayesian models using a pre-trained LLM, enabling the incorporation of external clinical expertise directly into Bayesian safety modeling. Through comprehensive temperature sensitivity analysis and rigorous cross-validation on real-world clinical trial data, we demonstrate that LLM-derived priors consistently improve predictive performance compared to traditional meta-analytical approaches. This methodology paves the way for more efficient and expert-informed clinical trial design, enabling substantial reductions in the number of patients required to achieve robust safety assessment and with the potential to transform drug safety monitoring and regulatory decision making.
title How many patients could we save with LLM priors?
topic Methodology
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
Information Retrieval
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04250