Download or read book A Hybrid Bayesian-frequentist Approach for the Design and Evaluation of Clinical Trials written by Vandana Mukhi and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent interests in cancer vaccine development have prompted the need to test a series of agents to screen out promising ones for further study. A typical but major challenge is to use a limited number of patients and other resources to screen a large number of agents. A high proportion of these agents are likely to have low activity and thus screening trial designs need to take into consideration the {\it a priori} distribution of the response proportion. Part two of this dissertation, proposes optimal two-stage designs that control a Bayesian-frequentist combination of error rates and evaluate the probability of early termination when response rates are below some uninteresting level. These optimal designs are desirable both for ethical reasons and for allocation of resources since they minimize the expected number of patients exposed to inactive agents. A flexible computer algorithm has been developed to calculate the new and existing optimal designs for screening trials.