A New Family of Covariate-Adjusted Response Adaptive Designs and their Asymptotic Properties

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new family of covariate-adjusted response-adaptive designs for clinical trials that are more efficient due to reduced variability, improving upon existing methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel family of CARA designs with smaller variabilities, enhancing efficiency over previous designs.

Findings

New CARA designs have smaller variabilities.

The designs are more efficient for clinical trial allocation.

Asymptotic properties are established.

Abstract

It is often important to incorporating covariate information in the design of clinical trials. In literature, there are many designs of using stratification and covariate-adaptive randomization to balance on certain known covariate. Recently Zhang, Hu, Cheung and Chan (2007) have proposed a family of covariate-adjusted response-adaptive (CARA) designs and studied their asymptotic properties. However, these CARA designs often have high variabilities. In this paper, we propose a new family of covariate-adjusted response-adaptive (CARA) designs. We show that the new designs have smaller variabilities and therefore more efficient.