When people ask for a random sequence, they’re often disappointed with what they get.
Random sequences clump more than most folks expect. For graphical applications, quasi-random sequence may be more appropriate.These sequences are “more random than random” in the sense that they behave more like what some folks expect from randomness. They jitter around like a random sequence, but they don’t clump as much.
Researchers conducting clinical trials are dismayed when a randomized trial puts several patients in a row on the same treatment. They want to assign patients one at a time to one of two treatments with equal probability, but they also want the allocation to work out evenly. This is like saying you want to flip a coin 100 times, and you also want to get exactly 50 heads and 50 tails. You can’t guarantee both, but there are effective compromises.
One approach is to randomize in blocks. For example, you could randomize in blocks of 10 patients by taking a sequence of 5 A’s and 5 B’s and randomly permuting the 10 letters. This guarantees that the allocations will be balanced, but some outcomes will be predictable. At a minimum, the last assignment in each block is always predictable: you assign whatever is left. Assignments could be even more predictable: if you give n A’s in a row in a block of 2n, you know the last n assignments will be all B’s.
Another approach is to “encourage” balance rather than enforce it. When you’ve given more A’s than B’s you could increase the probability of assigning a B. The greater the imbalance, the more heavily you bias the randomization probability in favor of the treatment that has been assigned less. This is a sort of compromise between equal randomization and block randomization. All assignments are random, though some assignments may be more predictable than others. Large imbalances are less likely than with equal randomization, but more likely than with block randomization. You can tune how aggressively the method responds to imbalances in order to make the method more like equal randomization or more like block randomization.
No approach to randomization will satisfy everyone because there are conflicting requirements. Randomization is a dilemma to be managed rather than a problem to be solved.
Related posts:
Quasi-random sequences in art and integration
Three ways of tuning an adaptively randomized trial
Population drift
Galen and clinical trials


