This afternoon I’m giving a talk at the Houston INFORMS chapter entitled “Bayesian adaptive clinical trials: promise and pitfalls.”
When I started working in adaptive clinical trials, I was very excited about the potential of such methods. The clinical trial methods most commonly used are very crude, and there’s plenty of room for improvement.
Over time I became concerned about overly complex methods, methods which were good for academic publication but may not be best for patients. Such methods are extremely time-consuming to develop and may not perform as well in practice as simpler methods.
There’s a great deal of opportunity between the extremes, methods that are more sophisticated than the status quo without being unnecessarily complex.
Are the slides or video available somewhere?
No audio or video. I may post the slides, but they don’t capture much of the talk. I only gave a brief prepared presentation and spent about 3x as long answering questions.
Thanks! I wish I could hear the talk.
I’m grappling with similar issues of complexity vs. usability in machine learning models for healthcare applications, especially as related to understanding causal relationships.