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SAM: Self-adapting mixture prior to dynamically borrow information from historical data in clinical trials.

Peng YangYuansong ZhaoLei NieJonathon VallejoYing Yuan
Published in: Biometrics (2023)
Mixture priors provide an intuitive way to incorporate historical data while accounting for potential prior-data conflict by combining an informative prior with a noninformative prior. However, prespecifying the mixing weight for each component remains a crucial challenge. Ideally, the mixing weight should reflect the degree of prior-data conflict, which is often unknown beforehand, posing a significant obstacle to the application and acceptance of mixture priors. To address this challenge, we introduce self-adapting mixture (SAM) priors that determine the mixing weight using likelihood ratio test statistics or Bayes factors. SAM priors are data-driven and self-adapting, favoring the informative (noninformative) prior component when there is little (substantial) evidence of prior-data conflict. Consequently, SAM priors achieve dynamic information borrowing. We demonstrate that SAM priors exhibit desirable properties in both finite and large samples and achieve information-borrowing consistency. Moreover, SAM priors are easy to compute, data-driven, and calibration-free, mitigating the risk of data dredging. Numerical studies show that SAM priors outperform existing methods in adopting prior-data conflicts effectively. We developed R package "SAMprior" and web application that are freely available at CRAN and www.trialdesign.org to facilitate the use of SAM priors.
Keyphrases
  • electronic health record
  • big data
  • clinical trial
  • body mass index
  • physical activity
  • healthcare
  • risk assessment
  • machine learning
  • data analysis
  • deep learning
  • health information
  • human health
  • double blind