Not Just for SPAM anymore

Virginia Postrel and I know Bayesian filters for their implementations in SPAM avoidance. She links to an article that discusses its promise in clinical trials.

Not many ideas of 18th-century Presbyterian ministers attract the interest of the pharmaceutical industry. But the works of Rev. Thomas Bayes have improved greatly with age. The paper that made his name was published in 1763 (two years after his death), where he proposed a method to decide the likelihood of an event while taking into account one's prior knowledge of what might occur. This idea bounced around through the mathematical literature for the next century or two, but it fell out of favor in the 1930s with the advent of the statistical methods that have been used ever since. For decades, no one heard very much about Bayesian statistics at all. One reason for this was they're much more computationally demanding, which was a real handicap until fairly recently.

I'm a math guy but not a stats guy ay all. I will try to find some rudimentary documentation on this as it has really caught my eye. The current methods in trials are broken, and cannot keep up with subtle interactions. Placebo trials are flat out irresponsible in chronic or terminal illnesses, yet the FDA still demand them.

Hat-tip: Don’t call her “Ginny…”

Pharmaceuticals Posted by jk at January 26, 2006 3:27 PM