A Weighted Prognostic Covariate Adjustment Method for Efficient and Powerful Treatment Effect Inferences in Randomized Controlled Trials

TL;DR

This paper introduces Weighted PROCOVA, a covariate adjustment method that leverages AI-generated predictions to improve treatment effect inference in RCTs, especially under heteroskedasticity, enhancing efficiency and power.

Contribution

It proposes a novel weighted covariate adjustment technique using AI-based digital twins to address heteroskedasticity in RCT analysis, ensuring unbiased and more powerful treatment effect estimates.

Findings

Reduces variance of treatment effect estimator

Maintains Type I error rate

Increases test power from 80% to 85-90%

Abstract

A crucial task for a randomized controlled trial (RCT) is to specify a statistical method that can yield an efficient estimator and powerful test for the treatment effect. A novel and effective strategy to obtain efficient and powerful treatment effect inferences is to incorporate predictions from generative artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms into covariate adjustment for the regression analysis of a RCT. Training a generative AI algorithm on historical control data enables one to construct a digital twin generator (DTG) for RCT participants, which utilizes a participant's baseline covariates to generate a probability distribution for their potential control outcome. Summaries of the probability distribution from the DTG are highly predictive of the trial outcome, and adjusting for these features via regression can thus improve the quality of treatment effect inferences, while satisfying regulatory guidelines on statistical analyses, for a RCT. However, a critical assumption in this strategy is homoskedasticity, or constant variance of the outcome conditional on the covariates. In the case of heteroskedasticity, existing covariate adjustment methods yield inefficient estimators and underpowered tests. We propose to address heteroskedasticity via a weighted prognostic covariate adjustment methodology (Weighted PROCOVA) that adjusts for both the mean and variance of the regression model using information obtained from the DTG. We prove that our method yields unbiased treatment effect estimators, and demonstrate via comprehensive simulation studies and case studies from Alzheimer's disease that it can reduce the variance of the treatment effect estimator, maintain the Type I error rate, and increase the power of the test for the treatment effect from 80% to 85%~90% when the variances from the DTG can explain 5%~10% of the variation in the RCT participants' outcomes.