Adaptive Designs for Sequential Treatment Allocation

This book presents a rigorous theoretical treatment of the results and mathematical foundation of adaptive design theory. The authors introduce the statistical models most commonly used in comparative experiments. They then illustrate biased coin and urn designs that only take into account past treatment allocations as well as designs that use past data, such as sequential maximum likelihood and doubly adaptive designs. The book also covers multipurpose adaptive experiments involving utilitarian choices and ethical issues and discusses covariate-adaptive methods.

Adaptive Designs for Sequential Treatment Allocation presents a rigorous theoretical treatment of the results and mathematical foundation of adaptive design theory. The book focuses on designing sequential randomized experiments to compare two or more treatments incorporating information accrued along the way.

The authors first introduce the terminology and statistical models most commonly used in comparative experiments. They then illustrate biased coin and urn designs that only take into account past treatment allocations as well as designs that use past data, such as sequential maximum likelihood and various types of doubly adaptive designs. The book also covers multipurpose adaptive experiments involving utilitarian choices and ethical issues. It ends with adaptive methods that include covariates in the design. The appendices present basic tools of optimal design theory and address Bayesian adaptive designs.

This book helps readers fully understand the theoretical properties behind various adaptive designs. Readers are then equipped to choose the best design for their experiment.