Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Measurements Of Generalizability And Adjustment For Bias In Clinical Trials, Yuanyuan Lu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are widely used as a gold standard in clinical research and public health, they are criticized because of a potential lack of generalizability, as the trial patients may be unrepresentative of the target patient population. Few research addresses how to assess and evaluate the generalizability of RCTs. As we know, patients are rarely selected on a random basis from a well-defined patient population of interest into a clinical trial. Generalizing findings from the RCT samples to the patient population has begun to receive increasing attention. We simulate a patient population with treatment effect size of …

Optimization In Non-Parametric Survival Analysis And Climate Change Modeling, Iuliana Teodorescu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many of the open problems of current interest in probability and statistics involve complicated data

sets that do not satisfy the strong assumptions of being independent and identically distributed. Often,

the samples are known only empirically, and making assumptions about underlying parametric

distributions is not warranted by the insufficient information available. Under such circumstances,

the usual Fisher or parametric Bayes approaches cannot be used to model the data or make predictions.

However, this situation is quite often encountered in some of the main challenges facing statistical,

data-driven studies of climate change, clinical studies, or financial markets, to name a few. …