Publications by Keith Goldfeld
Yes, unbalanced randomization can improve power, in some situations
Last time I provided some simulations that suggested that there might not be any efficiency-related benefits to using unbalanced randomization when the outcome is binary. This is a quick follow-up to provide a counter-example where the outcome in a two-group comparison is continuous. If the groups have different amounts of variability, intuitivel...
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Simulation for power in designing cluster randomized trials
As a biostatistician, I like to be involved in the design of a study as early as possible. I always like to say that I hope one of the first conversations an investigator has is with me, so that I can help clarify the research questions before getting into the design questions related to measurement, unit of randomization, and sample size. In the...
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To stratify or not? It might not actually matter…
Continuing with the theme of exploring small issues that come up in trial design, I recently used simulation to assess the impact of stratifying (or not) in the context of a multi-site Covid-19 trial with a binary outcome. The investigators are concerned that baseline health status will affect the probability of an outcome event, and are interest...
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Considering the number of categories in an ordinal outcome
In two Covid-19-related trials I’m involved with, the primary or key secondary outcome is the status of a patient at 14 days based on a World Health Organization ordered rating scale. In this particular ordinal scale, there are 11 categories ranging from 0 (uninfected) to 10 (death). In between, a patient can be infected but well enough to rema...
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When proportional odds is a poor assumption, collapsing categories is probably not going to save you
Continuing the discussion on cumulative odds models I started last time, I want to investigate a solution I always assumed would help mitigate a failure to meet the proportional odds assumption. I’ve believed if there is a large number of categories and the relative cumulative odds between two groups don’t appear proportional across all categ...
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Consider a permutation test for a small pilot study
Recently I wrote about the challenges of trying to learn too much from a small pilot study, even if it is a randomized controlled trial. There are limitations on how much you can learn about a treatment effect given the small sample size and relatively high variability of the estimate. However, the temptation for researchers is usually just too g...
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Simulating multiple RCTs to simulate a meta-analysis
I am currently involved with an RCT that is struggling to recruit eligible patients (by no means an unusual problem), increasing the risk that findings might be inconclusive. A possible solution to this conundrum is to find similar, ongoing trials with the aim of pooling data in a single analysis, to conduct a meta-analysis of sorts. In an ideal ...
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A Bayesian model for a simulated meta-analysis
This is essentially an addendum to the previous post where I simulated data from multiple RCTs to explore an analytic method to pool data across different studies. In that post, I used the nlme package to conduct a meta-analysis based on individual level data of 12 studies. Here, I am presenting an alternative hierarchical modeling approach that ...
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A hurdle model for COVID-19 infections in nursing homes
Late last year, I added a mixture distribution to the simstudy package, largely motivated to accommodate zero-inflated Poisson or negative binomial distributions. (I really thought I had added this two years ago – but time is moving so slowly these days.) These distributions are useful when modeling count data, but we anticipate observing more ...
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Generating data from a truncated distribution
A researcher reached out to me the other day to see if the simstudy package provides a quick and easy way to generate data from a truncated distribution. Other than the noZeroPoisson distribution option (which is a very specific truncated distribution), there is no way to do this directly. You can always generate data from the full distribution a...
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