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A robust method for estimating optimal treatment regimes. (English) Zbl 1258.62116

Summary: A treatment regime is a rule that assigns a treatment, among a set of possible treatments, to a patient as a function of his/her observed characteristics, hence “personalizing” treatments to the patient. The goal is to identify the optimal treatment regime that, if followed by the entire population of patients, would lead to the best outcome on average. Given data from a clinical trial or observational study, for a single treatment decision, the optimal regime can be found by assuming a regression model for the expected outcome conditional on treatment and covariates, where, for a given set of covariates, the optimal treatment is the one that yields the most favorable expected outcome. However, treatment assignments via such a regime is suspect if the regression model is incorrectly specified. Recognizing that, even if misspecified, such a regression model defines a class of regimes, we instead consider finding the optimal regime within such a class by finding the regime that optimizes an estimator of overall population mean outcomes. To take into account possible confounding in an observational study and to increase precision, we use a doubly robust augmented inverse probability weighted estimator for this purpose. Simulations and application to data from a breast cancer clinical trial demonstrate the performance of the method.

MSC:

62P10 Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis
92C50 Medical applications (general)
65C60 Computational problems in statistics (MSC2010)

Software:

rgenoud
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