Speaker: Dr. Masihuddin

Title of the Talk: On estimating the selected treatment mean under a two-stage ``Drop-the-Losers" design

Date, Time and venue: 18th July, 2024 at 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., at Meeting Room, Dept of Mathematics.

Abstract: A common problem faced in clinical studies is that of estimating the effect of the most effective (e.g. the one having the largest mean) treatment among k(≥2) available treatments. The most effective treatment is adjudged based on numerical values of some statistic corresponding to the k treatments. A proper design for such problems is the so-called “Drop-the-Losers Design (DLD)”. We consider two treatments whose effects are described by independent Gaussian distributions having different unknown means and a common known variance. To select the more effective treatment, the two treatments are independently administered to n1 subjects each and the treatment corresponding to the larger sample mean is selected. To study the effect of the adjudged more effective treatment (i.e. estimating its mean), we consider the two-stage DLD in which n2 subjects are further administered the adjudged more effective treatment in the second stage of the design. In this talk, I will discuss the problem of estimating the selected treatment mean under the DLD set-up and provide a summary of the results obtained.