Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Individualized Treatment Rules: Generating Candidate Clinical Trials, Maya Petersen, Steven G. Deeks, Mark J. Van Der Laan

Maya Petersen

Individualized treatment rules, or rules for altering treatments over time in response to changes in individual covariates, are of primary importance in the practice of clinical medicine. Several statistical methods aim to estimate the rule, termed an optimal dynamic treatment regime, which will result in the best expected outcome in a population. In this article, we discuss estimation of an alternative type of dynamic regime—the statically optimal treatment rule. History-adjusted marginal structural models (HA-MSM) estimate individualized treatment rules that assign, at each time point, the first action of the future static treatment plan that optimizes expected outcome given a patient’s …