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Record W3016729763 · doi:10.1177/1740774520914306

Bayesian methods for pilot studies

2020· article· en· W3016729763 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueClinical Trials · 2020
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMathematics
TopicStatistical Methods in Clinical Trials
Canadian institutionsMcMaster UniversityPublic Health OntarioSt. Joseph’s Healthcare HamiltonImpactSickKids FoundationUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsRandomized controlled trialFrequentist inferencePrior probabilityBayesian probabilityStatisticsConfidence intervalComputer scienceMedicineBayesian inferenceMathematicsSurgery

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BACKGROUND/AIMS: The use of pilot studies to help inform the design of randomized controlled trials has increased significantly over the last couple of decades. A pilot study can provide estimates of feasibility parameters, such as the recruitment, compliance and follow-up probabilities. The use of frequentist confidence intervals of these estimates fails to provide a meaningful measure of the uncertainty as it pertains to the design of the associated randomized controlled trial. The objective of this article is to introduce Bayesian methods for the analysis of pilot studies for determining the feasibility of an associated randomized controlled trial. METHODS: An example from the literature is used to illustrate the advantages of a Bayesian approach for accounting for the uncertainty in pilot study results when assessing the feasibility of an associated randomized controlled trial. Vague beta distribution priors for the feasibility parameters are used. Based on the results from a feasibility study, simulation methods are used to determine the expected power of specified recruitment strategies for an associated randomized controlled trial. RESULTS: The vague priors used for the feasibility parameters are demonstrated to be considerably robust. Beta distribution posteriors for the feasibility parameters lead to beta-binomial predictive distributions for an associated randomized controlled trial regarding the number of patients randomized, the number of patients who are compliant and the number of patients who complete follow-up. Ignoring the uncertainty in pilot study results can lead to inadequate power for an associated randomized controlled trial. CONCLUSION: Applying Bayesian methods to pilot studies' results provides direct inference about the feasibility parameters and quantifies the uncertainty regarding the feasibility of an associated randomized controlled trial in an intuitive and meaningful way. Furthermore, Bayesian methods can identify recruitment strategies that yield the desired power for an associated randomized controlled trial.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.157
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.976
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.875
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1570.976
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0050.002
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.980
GPT teacher head0.808
Teacher spread0.172 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it