In this blog, I would like to argue that current standards of tele-conferences can and should be further improved and tele-conferences may help to reduce job-related travels and carbon emissions. I used the title “AV in an AI world” because I am still surprised to see how low the quality of tele-conferences (AV=audiovisuals) in many…
Considering myself an academic with a social science (MSc, PhD in psychology) and tech (MSc Medical Statistics, Post-doc in genomics) background, I find it highly interesting that Mitchell Baker, head of the Mozilla Foundation (cf Firefox browser), is arguing that hiring employees who mainly come from STEM (Science, technology, engineering and maths) will produce a…
Doug Altman, a professor of statistics at the University of Oxford, died June 3, 2018. Some of his achievements from the Orbituary in The Scientist [1] and Cochrane Library [2]: 1986: Publication of Bland-Altman plot, an incredibly popular technique to visually compare two different methods of taking clinical measurements. According to Nature in 2014, their…
The statistical analysis system R can be extended by a huge number of contributed packages which are stored in the central CRAN repository with multiple synced mirrors around the world. To access this repository from clients in a secure network, and install the packages in a local R installation may pose a security risk, require…
Today I would like to talk about a common problem in clinical trials in progressive disease (e.g. cancer) with an time-to-event endpoint (eg progression or death), which concerns the interpretation of interim results with low maturity. Low maturity can be caused: “by design”: by selection of a timepoint where only a limited fraction of events…
Just became aware that “The Lancet” committee has launched a new journal on “Planetary Health” [1] in April 2017. Well, this is not brand new anymore, but still noteworthy since its selection of topic is direly needed. 20 years ago I would have even called the journal visionary, but in our times of immediate pollution…
This tutorial [PDF] aims to support the interpretation of parametric time-to-event models by explaining how to calculate the hazard ratio, which is a conventional effect size to evaluate clinical relevance of treatment effects. The following distributions, which are considered most important for health economic analyses, are implemented in the flexsurv package (cf ?flexsurvreg): exp: exponential…
I recently read the book “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (2016) by Cathy O’Neil [1, 2], who describes how the mass application of predictive algorithms transforms society and the involved risks using examples from the USA. For example, prediction algorithms for crime may use ethnicity (eg black vs white) leading to more police patrols in areas…
Many branches of the industry are joining the hype around using deep neural networks or complex machine learning approaches, eg gradient boosting machines, random forests. However, I am sceptical that these “black box” algorithms will make major contributions to drug development, since the problems in clinical trials seems conceptually different from, eg image or speech…
In randomized controlled clinical trials, the confounding of the treatment with other factors (sex, age, other patient characteristics) at baseline is of crucial importance as well as maintaining the integrity of the treatment during the trial. However, an important uncontrolled factor violating the integrity of the treatment is patient behaviour, especially in response to his…