Success-Odds: An improved Win-Ratio
Edgar Brunner

TL;DR
This paper introduces the success-odds, a modified win-ratio measure for comparing therapies in clinical trials with ordinal or dichotomous outcomes, addressing issues with ties and interpretability.
Contribution
It proposes the success-odds as a new, more intuitive measure for treatment effects that remains well-behaved in the presence of ties, along with hypothesis tests and confidence intervals.
Findings
Success-odds equals win-ratio when no ties are present.
Success-odds remains interpretable with ties, unlike win-ratio.
The paper discusses challenges in extending these measures to multiple treatments.
Abstract
Multiple and combined endpoints involving also non-normal outcomes appear in many clinical trials in various areas in medicine. In some cases, the outcome can be observed only on an ordinal or dichotomous scale. Then the success of two therapies is assessed by comparing the outcome of two randomly selected patients from the two therapy groups by 'better', 'equal' or 'worse'. These outcomes can be described by the probabilities , , and . For a clinician, however, these quantities are less intuitive. Therefore, Noether (1987) introduced the quantity assuming continuous distributions. The same quantity was used by Pocock et al. (2012) and by Wang and Pocock (2016) also for general non-normal outcomes and has been called 'win-ratio' . Unlike Noether (1987), Wang and Pocock (2016) explicitly allowed for ties in the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsStatistical Methods in Clinical Trials · Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life · Advanced Causal Inference Techniques
