Research Seminar
Treatment INteraction Trees: A tool to identify disordinal treatment-subgroup interactionsElise DusseldorpTNO Quality of Life and KU Leuven | |
| Abstract: | When two competitive treatments, A and B, are available, some subgroup of patients may display a better outcome with treatment A than with B, whereas for another subgroup the reverse may be true. If this is the case, a disordinal (i.e., a qualitative) treatment-subgroup interaction is present. Such interactions imply that some subgroups of patients should be treated differently, and are therefore most relevant for clinical practice. In case of data from randomized clinical trials with many patient characteristics that could interact with treatment in a complex way, a suitable statistical approach to detect disordinal treatment-subgroup interactions is not yet available. In this presentation, we introduce a new method for this purpose, called Treatment INteraction Trees (TINT). TINT results in a binary tree that subdivides the patients into terminal nodes on the basis of patient characteristics; these nodes are further assigned to one of three classes: a first one for which A is better than B, a second one for which B is better than A, and an optional third one for which type of treatment makes no difference. Results of a pilot test of TINT on artificial data will be shown, as well as results of an application to real data from the Breast Cancer Recovery Project. A short demonstration of the software will be given. |
| Date: | Tue Apr 20, 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm |
| Place: | room 02.51 (Department of Psychology, Tiensestraat 102, 3000 Leuven) |