ABSTRACT
Mixed Categorical and Continuous Covariates . . . . . . . . . . 377 17.4 Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
17.4.1 Elicitation of the Prior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379 17.4.2 Operating Characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380
17.5 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384
In recent years, response-adaptive (RA) randomization has drawn an increasing amount of attention in clinical research [7, 16]. RA randomization utilizes accumulating information on the previous patients’ responses to skew the treatment assignment probabilities and assign more patients to the better treatment arms [5, 10, 13, 15, 18]. Such a design is useful for mitigating the ethical problem of randomly assigning an equal number of patients to each treatment in a clinical trial when some treatment arms may be inferior to others, by allowing the trial to assign fewer patients to the inferior treatment
arms. Part IV of this book provides a comprehensive review of RA randomization.
