NIH Record - National Institutes of Health

Proschan to Present Methods Webinar, Oct. 15

Dr. Michael Proschan, wearing headphones and mic, looks to be piloting a plane
NIAID’s Dr. Michael Proschan will give ODP’s next Mind the Gap webinar.

Join the Office of Disease Prevention for a Methods: Mind the Gap webinar with Dr. Michael Proschan on the use of randomization-based inference in prevention research. This webinar will take place on Friday, Oct. 15 at 11 a.m. ET.

Clinical trials are the gold standard of medical evidence and randomization is the cornerstone of clinical trials. In this presentation, Proschan will show how to conduct a test of an intervention effect using only the randomization. 

This “randomization test” is valid with virtually no assumptions and can be applied regardless of the randomization method—simple, permuted block, even covariate- or response-adaptive randomization (but avoid response-adaptive randomization in clinical trials!). With the most standard randomization methods, the randomization test is nearly the same as a t-test if the sample sizes are large.

Randomization tests can also be used to construct confidence intervals. If your trial requires major unplanned changes and you have not yet broken the treatment blind, guess what approach can save you? That’s right—the randomization test!

Proschan is a mathematical statistician at NIAID with 32 years of experience in clinical trials. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from Florida State University in 1989 and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He loves teaching and has been an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University. He is co-author of two books, Statistical Monitoring of Clinical Trials: A Unified Approach and Essentials of Probability Theory for Statisticians, and just completed a third book, Statistical Thinking in Clinical Trials (in press).

Registration is required. Register at prevention.nih.gov/education-training/methods-mind-gap/randomization-based-inference-prevention-research. The webinar will be recorded and available on the ODP website within approximately 1 week. 

The webinar series explores research design, measurement, intervention, data analysis and other methods of interest in prevention science. For more information, visit prevention.nih.gov/MindTheGap.

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