Asymptotically Optimal Response‐Adaptive Designs for Allocating the Best Treatment: An Overview

Resume  Les plans d’experiences qui s’adaptent aux reponses deja acquises sont de plus en plus frequemment utilises dans les applications, et c’est tout particulierement vrai pour les essais cliniques en phase precoce. Cet article est une revue dediee a une classe de plans adaptatifs qui ont pour propriete de selectionner le meilleur traitement avec une probabilite tendant vers un. D’un point de vue ethique, ceci est une propriete souhaitable pour les essais cliniques. Pour de tels plans, le modele sous-jacent est un modele d’urne aleatoirement renforcee. Cet article presente un panorama des resultats concernant ces plans, allant de l’article seminal de Durham et Yu (1990) jusqu’au travail recent de Flournoy et al. (2010). Summary Response-adaptive designs are being used increasingly in applications, and this is especially so in early phase clinical trials. This paper reviews a particular class of response-adaptive designs that have the property of picking the superior treatment with probability tending to one. This is a desirable property from an ethical point of view in clinical trials. The model underlying such designs is a randomly reinforced urn. This paper provides an overview of results for these designs, starting from the early paper of Durham and Yu (1990) until the recent work by Flournoy, May, Moler and Plo (2010).

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