Incorporating Prior Beliefs in Treatment Allocation for Clinical Trials

Recently Faraggi and Reiser (1991) introduced a general dynamic treatment allocation scheme which incorporates the permuted block allocation procedure and the Begg Iglewicz procedure as special cases. A drawback of previous allocation methods is that they did not allow incorporation of prior knowledge of the relative importance of the prognostic factors. In this paper we extend our allocation model to incorporate the weighting of prognostic factors. A simulation study examines the effects of this procedure and an example of its implementation is given.