Estimating optimal treatment regimes via subgroup identification in randomized control trials and observational studies

With new treatments and novel technology available, personalized medicine has become an important piece in the new era of medical product development. Traditional statistics methods for personalized medicine and subgroup identification primarily focus on single treatment or two arm randomized control trials. Motivated by the recent development of outcome weighted learning framework, we propose an alternative algorithm to search treatment assignments which has a connection with subgroup identification problems. Our method focuses on applications from clinical trials to generate easy to interpret results. This framework is able to handle two or more than two treatments from both randomized control trials and observational studies. We implement our algorithm in C++ and connect it with R. Its performance is evaluated by simulations, and we apply our method to a dataset from a diabetes study. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.