Complete populations of virtual patients for in silico clinical trials.

Motivation: Model-based approaches to safety and efficacy assessment of pharmacological drugs, treatment strategies or medical devices (In Silico Clinical Trial, ISCT) aim to decrease time and cost for the needed experimentations, reduce animal and human testing, and enable precision medicine. Unfortunately, in presence of non-identifiable models (e.g.

Cross-Validated Bagged Learning.

Many applications aim to learn a high dimensional parameter of a data generating distribution based on a sample of independent and identically distributed observations. For example, the goal might be to estimate the conditional mean of an outcome given a list of input variables. In this prediction context, bootstrap aggregating (bagging) has been introduced as a method to reduce the variance of a given estimator at little cost to bias.

Biomarker discovery using targeted maximum-likelihood estimation: application to the treatment of antiretroviral-resistant HIV infection.

Researchers in clinical science and bioinformatics frequently aim to learn which of a set of candidate biomarkers is important in determining a given outcome, and to rank the contributions of the candidates accordingly. This article introduces a new approach to research questions of this type, based on targeted maximum-likelihood estimation of variable importance measures.The methodology is illustrated using an example drawn from the treatment of HIV infection.

Super learning: an application to the prediction of HIV-1 drug resistance.

Many alternative data-adaptive algorithms can be used to learn a predictor based on observed data. Examples of such learners include decision trees, neural networks, support vector regression, least angle regression, logic regression, and the Deletion/Substitution/Addition algorithm. The optimal learner for prediction will vary depending on the underlying data-generating distribution.

Cross-validated bagged prediction of survival.

In this article, we show how to apply our previously proposed Deletion/Substitution/Addition algorithm in the context of right-censoring for the prediction of survival. Furthermore, we introduce how to incorporate bagging into the algorithm to obtain a cross-validated bagged estimator. The method is used for predicting the survival time of patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma based on gene expression variables.