Dynamic Treatment Regimes

Dynamic Treatment Regimes: Statistical Methods for Precision Medicine provides a comprehensive introduction to statistical methodology for the evaluation and discovery of dynamic treatment regimes from data. Researchers and graduate students in statistics, data science, and related quantitative disciplines with a background in probability and statistical inference and popular statistical modeling techniques will be prepared for further study of this rapidly evolving field.

A dynamic treatment regime is a set of sequential decision rules, each corresponding to a key decision point in a disease or disorder process, where each rule takes as input patient information and returns the treatment option he or she should receive. Thus, a treatment regime formalizes how a clinician synthesizes patient information and selects treatments in practice. Treatment regimes are of obvious relevance to precision medicine, which involves tailoring treatment selection to patient characteristics in an evidence-based way. Of critical importance to precision medicine is estimation of an optimal treatment regime, one that, if used to select treatments for the patient population, would lead to the most beneficial outcome on average. Key methods for estimation of an optimal treatment regime from data are motivated and described in detail. A dedicated companion website presents full accounts of application of the methods using a comprehensive R package developed by the authors.

The authors’ website www.dtr-book.com includes updates, corrections, new papers, and links to useful websites.

Anastasios Tsiatis is Gertrude M. Cox Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Marie Davidian is J. Stuart Hunter Distinguished Professor, Shannon Holloway is Senior Research Scholar, and Eric Laber is Goodnight Distinguished Professor, all in the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University. They have published extensively and are internationally-recognized authorities on methodology for dynamic treatment regimes.