balancing treatment allocation over continuous covariates a new imbalance measure for minimization平衡治疗分配连续反是一个新的不平衡测量最小化.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Probability and Statistics Volume 2012, Article ID 842369, 13 pages doi:10.1155/2012/842369 Research Article Balancing Treatment Allocation over Continuous Covariates: A New Imbalance Measure for Minimization Yanqing Hu1 and Feifang Hu2 1 Department of Statistics, West Virginia University, Hodges Hall, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA 2 Department of Statistics, University of Virginia, Halsey Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Feifang Hu, fh6e@ Received 12 January 2012; Revised 10 April 2012; Accepted 7 May 2012 Academic Editor: Peter van der Heijden Copyright q 2012 Y. Hu and F. Hu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In many clinical trials, it is important to balance treatment allocation over covariates. Although a great many papers have been published on balancing over discrete covariates, the procedures for continuous covariates have been less well studied. Traditionally, a continuous covariate usually needs to be transformed to a discrete one by splitting its range into several categories. Such practice may lead to loss of information and is susceptible to misspecification of covariate distribution. The more recent papers seek to define an imbalance measure that preserves the nature of continuous covariates and set the allocation rule in order to minimize that measure. We propose a new design, which defines the imbalance measure by the maximum assignment difference when all possible divisions of the covariate range are considered. This measure depends only on ranks of the covariate values and is there