McMaster University

Graduate Program in Statistics



STATISTICS SEMINAR



SPEAKER:
Ajit C. Tamhane
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
Northwestern University.
Date :Wednesday November 6, 2002.
Time : 3:30pm
Address Burke Science Building
Room: 138
TITLE:
A Superiority-Equivalence Approach to One-Sided Tests on Multiple Endpoints in Clinical Trials
ABSTRACT:
This paper gives a new formulation of the one-sided multivariate testing problem. This formulation is (i) practically relevant in the context of comparing a new treatment with a control on multiple endpoints, (ii) avoids the anomalies associated with the likelihood ratio test that uses the traditional null hypothesis formulation, and (iii) requires very little multiplicity adjustment. The hypotheses are formulated with the goal of showing that the treatment is equivalent (not inferior) on all endpoints and superior on at least one endpoint compared to the control, where thresholds for equivalence and superiority are specified for each endpoint. The union-intersection (Roy 1953) and intersection-union (Berger 1982) principles are employed to derive the basic test. It is shown that the critical constants required by this test can be sharpened by a careful analysis of its size. The test is illustrated by an example. Some extensions of the test are mentioned.
About the Speaker
Ajit C. Tamhane is professor and chair of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University in Illinois, U.S.A. He is also a professor in the Department of Statistics at Northwestern. He is the co-author of two books. One of his books "Multiple Comparison Procedures" written with Y. Hochberg has become a standard reference on the subject of multiple comparisons. This is one of the areas of Professor Tamhane's research interests particularly in its applications in biostatistics. Other areas of interest include Taguchi-type methods for ordered categorical data, experimental design and quality control.

Professor Tamhane received his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay and his M.S. and Ph.D. in statistics and operations research from Cornell University.

References
Here are Adobe pdf files of the transparencies used in the talk and a preprint of the paper on which the talk is based.

Other useful background references are:



Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Graduate Program in Statistics

This page is maintained by Angelo Canty,
Last updated on November 12, 2002