zoom link, opens an external URL in a new window

Meeting-ID: 280 519 2121
Passwort: 584190

Abstract:

In medical research rating scales for quality of life, clinical outcome after surgery, assessment of pain, and other patient-relevant aspects are frequently used. Mathematically, these are ordinal measurements, particularly if the number of categories is small (e.g., a 7-point qualitative scale from “no symptoms” (0) to “death” (6)). Hence, classical parametric methods cannot be applied, and nonparametric approaches should be considered as an alternative instead. However, providing recommendations regarding which method to use is sometimes difficult, due to the lack of systematic empirical comparisons of different approaches. Moreover, especially in applied research, classical “cookbook recipes” are widely used, which might be a barrier with respect to implementing more nuanced methodological considerations in practice. On top of that, there are still some settings of high practical relevance (e.g., covariate adjustment) which pose methodological challenges to statisticians. Therefore, the talk addresses those aspects by presenting some recent methodological developments in the field of nonparametric rank-based statistics, motivated by applications in medical research, especially in research on rare diseases.