Minimization method for balancing continuous prognostic variables between treatment and control groups using Kullback-Leibler divergence.

This paper proposes a method for balancing prognostic variables between treatment and control groups in design of clinical trials. It assumes that some of prognostic variables are continuous and others are categorical and that they are independently distributed. The proposed method uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) as the index of difference in distribution between two groups.