Statistical tests for multivariate bioequivalence

Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA, 1992) recommends testing bioequivalence of individual pharmacokinetic parameters one at a time, it seems reasonable and interesting to conduct a test simultaneously for all the parameters. In this paper, we discuss several ways to construct such tests. It is shown that the confidence set approach leads to a test which can be uniformly improved by the intersection of Schuirmann's two one-sided tests procedure. The latter test can further be improved upon noticeably by using the one-dimensional unbiased test of Brown, Hwang & Munk (1997). Numerical calculations of powers are given to support this claim.