0:00
This is a Henry Stewart talk
on an introduction
to randomization for clinical trials.
My name is William F. Rosenberger.
I'm University Professor
and Chairman
of the Department of Statistics
at George Mason University.
I also have written two books
on the subject of randomization.
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Randomization
is a time-tested concept
that has appeared
in clinical trials since the 1950s.
I'm going to discuss
different randomization procedures,
and then I'm going to compare them,
and then I'm going to talk about
using the randomization itself
as a basis for inference.
I'll discuss stratification
in clinical trials
and then draw some conclusions.
We begin with an introduction.
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Clinical trials had been
the gold standard
in medical research
for the past 70 years.
Clinical trials began
after the Second World War,
and in fact, some of the great
cryptographers in the war
later became biostatisticians
at the National Institutes
of Health
and the Medical Research Council
in Britain following the war.
And there we have the development
of modern biostatistics,
or in the UK
often called medical statistics.
In this talk, I'm going to focus
on a particular area
of statistical methodology
that really forms
the backbone of clinical trials,
and that is
the concept of randomization.
Initially,
randomization was developed
in the context
of agricultural studies.
Sir R. A. Fisher
was one of the leading proponents
but randomization
has a natural home
in the context of clinical trials.
