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…
Immuno-oncology drugs stimulate the immune-system of the patient to fight cancer cells. These effects might be enhanced by using Pawlowing conditioning of external stimuli to the drug. For example, Pawlow demonstrated that by exposing dogs (cf patients) to the ringing of a bell (eg white coat of clinician) during feeding time, the unconditioned reaction of…
The following paper is a breakthrough in facial feature recognition and numeric representation of facial features and may be helpful to understand the genomic basis of facial features (once the relevant dimensions of the phenome are identified), but also to help to recognize the emotional expression in human faces [1,2]. [1] http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30538-X [2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-4013124
KAGGLE’s newest predictive analytics competition on improving the Zillow’s Home Value Prediction with an overall prize money of $1,200,000 is currently the talk of the town and has attracted 716 teams ·(7 months to go, 4 months to go until merger deadline) [1]. Are you interested in joining my team? [1] https://www.kaggle.com/c/zillow-prize-1/data