A new design strategy for hypothesis testing under response adaptive randomization

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide a new design strategy for response adaptive randomization in the case of normal response trials aimed at testing the superiority of one of two available treatments. In particular, we introduce a new test statistic based on the treatment allocation proportion ensuing the adoption of a suitable response adaptive randomization rule that could be more efficient and uniformly more powerful with respect to the classical Wald test. We analyze the conditions under which the suggested strategy, derived by matching an asymptotically best response adaptive procedure and a suitably chosen target allocation, could induce a monotonically increasing power that discriminates with high precision the chosen alternatives. Moreover, we introduce and analyze new classes of targets aimed at maximizing the power of the new statistical test, showing both analytically and via simulations i) how the power function of the suggested test increases as the ethical skew of the chosen target grows, namely overcoming the usual trade-off between ethics and inference, and ii) the substantial gain of inferential precision ensured by the proposed approach.