Scholars@Duke
Eric Laber

Eric Laber

James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Statistical Science
Statistical Science
eric.laber@duke.edu
Box 90251, Durham, NC 27708-0251
221 Old Chem Bldg, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

Hand Grip Strength Predicts Mortality and Quality of Life in Heart Failure: Insights From the Singapore Cohort of Patients With Advanced Heart Failure.

Journal Article J Card Fail · June 2023 BACKGROUND: Frailty is prevalent among patients with heart failure (HF) and is associated with increased mortality rates and worse patient-centered outcomes. Hand grip strength (GS) has been proposed as a single-item marker of frailty and a potential scree ... Full text Link to item Cite

Reinforcement Learning Methods in Public Health.

Journal Article Clinical therapeutics · January 2022 PurposeReinforcement learning (RL) is the subfield of machine learning focused on optimal sequential decision making under uncertainty. An optimal RL strategy maximizes cumulative utility by experimenting only if and when the information generated ... Full text Cite

Sample Size Calculations for SMARTs

Journal Article · June 16, 2019 Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trials (SMARTs) are considered the gold standard for estimation and evaluation of treatment regimes. SMARTs are typically sized to ensure sufficient power for a simple comparison, e.g., the comparison of two fixed ... Link to item Cite

Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves and Confidence Bands for Support Vector Machines

Journal Article · July 17, 2018 Many problems that appear in biomedical decision making, such as diagnosing disease and predicting response to treatment, can be expressed as binary classification problems. The costs of false positives and false negatives vary across application domains a ... Link to item Cite

Identifying optimal dosage regimes under safety constraints: An application to long term opioid treatment of chronic pain.

Journal Article Statistics in medicine · April 2018 There is growing interest and investment in precision medicine as a means to provide the best possible health care. A treatment regime formalizes precision medicine as a sequence of decision rules, one per clinical intervention period, that specify if, whe ... Full text Cite

Optimizing delivery of a behavioral pain intervention in cancer patients using a sequential multiple assignment randomized trial SMART.

Journal Article Contemp Clin Trials · June 2017 BACKGROUND/AIMS: Pain is common in cancer patients and results in lower quality of life, depression, poor physical functioning, financial difficulty, and decreased survival time. Behavioral pain interventions are effective and nonpharmacologic. Traditional ... Full text Link to item Cite

Using decision lists to construct interpretable and parsimonious treatment regimes.

Journal Article Biometrics · December 2015 A treatment regime formalizes personalized medicine as a function from individual patient characteristics to a recommended treatment. A high-quality treatment regime can improve patient outcomes while reducing cost, resource consumption, and treatment burd ... Full text Link to item Cite

Q- and A-learning Methods for Estimating Optimal Dynamic Treatment Regimes.

Journal Article Stat Sci · November 2014 In clinical practice, physicians make a series of treatment decisions over the course of a patient's disease based on his/her baseline and evolving characteristics. A dynamic treatment regime is a set of sequential decision rules that operationalizes this ... Full text Link to item Cite

Inference about the expected performance of a data-driven dynamic treatment regime.

Journal Article Clinical trials (London, England) · August 2014 BackgroundA dynamic treatment regime (DTR) comprises a sequence of decision rules, one per stage of intervention, that recommends how to individualize treatment to patients based on evolving treatment and covariate history. These regimes are usefu ... Full text Cite

Assessing the causal effect of organ transplantation on the distribution of residual lifetime.

Journal Article Biometrics · December 2013 Because the number of patients waiting for organ transplants exceeds the number of organs available, a better understanding of how transplantation affects the distribution of residual lifetime is needed to improve organ allocation. However, there has been ... Full text Link to item Cite

Robust estimation of optimal dynamic treatment regimes for sequential treatment decisions.

Journal Article Biometrika · 2013 A dynamic treatment regime is a list of sequential decision rules for assigning treatment based on a patient's history. Q- and A-learning are two main approaches for estimating the optimal regime, i.e., that yielding the most beneficial outcome in the pati ... Full text Link to item Cite

A robust method for estimating optimal treatment regimes.

Journal Article Biometrics · December 2012 A treatment regime is a rule that assigns a treatment, among a set of possible treatments, to a patient as a function of his/her observed characteristics, hence "personalizing" treatment to the patient. The goal is to identify the optimal treatment regime ... Full text Link to item Cite

Estimating Optimal Treatment Regimes from a Classification Perspective.

Journal Article Stat · January 1, 2012 A treatment regime maps observed patient characteristics to a recommended treatment. Recent technological advances have increased the quality, accessibility, and volume of patient-level data; consequently, there is a growing need for powerful and flexible ... Full text Link to item Cite