Abstract
In many toxicological assays, interactions between primary and secondary effects may cause a downturn in mean responses at high doses. In this situation, the typical monotonicity assumption is invalid and may be quite misleading. Prior literature addresses the analysis of response functions with a downturn, but so far as we know, this paper initiates the study of experimental design for this situation. A growth model is combined with a death model to allow for the downturn in mean doses. Several different objective functions are studied. When the number of treatments equals the number of parameters, Fisher information is found to be independent of the model of the treatment means and on the magnitudes of the treatments. In general, A- and DA-optimal weights for estimating adjacent mean differences are found analytically for a simple model and numerically for a biologically motivated model. Results on c-optimality are also obtained for estimating the peak dose and the EC50 (the treatment with response half way between the control and the peak response on the increasing portion of the response function). Finally, when interest lies only in the increasing portion of the response function, we propose composite D-optimal designs.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 559-575 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference |
Volume | 141 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 2011 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- A-optimality
- D-optimality
- D-optimality
- Dose-response
- EC
- Endocrine-disrupting chemicals
- Experimental design
- Laboratory studies
- Nonlinear response function
- Optimal weights
- Peak dose
- Successive mean differences
- Toxicological assays
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Statistics and Probability
- Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
- Applied Mathematics