All are invited to the hybrid Bradford Hill Seminar:

Casual Inference for Clinical Trails: A Spellchecker’s Guide to Randomization Tests in Complex Settings

Professor William Rosenberger 

George Mason University, USA

Register to attend

Please note this will be a hybrid seminar, with the option to attend in-person (Large Seminar Room, East Forvie Building, Forvie Site, Robinson Way, Cambridge CB2 0SR) or virtually (via Zoom).

Register in advance for this free hybrid seminar:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bradford-hill-seminar-by-prof-william-rosenberger-tickets-660467816017

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Abstract

Sir Austin Bradford Hill, the developer of the first randomized clinical trial, was a proponent of simplicity in statistical analysis, and strongly emphasized careful study design as the critical component of all medical studies. While he didn’t mention randomization tests in his 1937 book, I believe he would have liked their simplicity and interpretability. While we hear quite often about preservation of type I error rates and, more recently, about causal inference, these are natural elements of a randomization test. We discuss these issues and demonstrate that randomization tests can be used for more complex settings, such as multiple (>2) treatment comparisons, analyses with missing outcome data, and subgroup analyses. These topics extend some of the issues discussed originally in my Armitage Lecture at Cambridge in 2017.

About Professor Rosenberger

Professor William F. Rosenberger is University Professor at George Mason University. He received his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from George Washington University in 1992 and since then has spent much of his career developing statistical methodology for randomized clinical trials. He has two books on the subject, Randomization in Clinical Trials: Theory and Practice (Wiley, 2002), which won the Association of American Publishers Award for the best mathematics/statistics book published that year, and has recently been issued in a second edition (Wiley, 2016); and The Theory of Response-Adaptive Randomization in Clinical Trials (Wiley, 2006). He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (2005) and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2011).

An author of over 100 refereed papers, Prof. Rosenberger was named the 2012 Outstanding Research Faculty by the Volgenau School of Engineering, George Mason University, where he also served as Chairman of their Department of Statistics for 13 years, hiring 16 faculty and developing programs at the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. levels. In 2014, he received a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to support his sabbatical at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. That same year he was promoted to the rank of University Professor, which is reserved for “eminent” individuals on the faculty “of great national or international reputation.” In 2017 he was named the 15th Armitage Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, UK. He has been elected the North American Editor of the tier-1 biostatistical methodology journal Biometrics, for 2021-2024. He has supervised 20 doctoral students who are now leaders in academia, industry, and government.

About the Bradford Hill seminars

The Bradford Hill seminar series is the principal series of The Cambridge Population Health Sciences Partnership. This comprises the Departments of Public Health & Primary Care, MRC Biostatistics Unit and MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, bringing together a multi-disciplinary partnership of academics and public health professionals. The Bradford Hill seminar programme of internationally recognised speakers covers topics of broad interest to our public health research community. It aims to transcend as well as connect the activities of our individual partners.

All are welcome at our Bradford Hill seminars.