Hi Pyry and Jacob,
 
If you exclude zero etas then what happens to infomative individuals who just 
happen to have the population typical values?  
This approch would exclude these individuals when trying to indicate how 
informative an estimation is about a parameter.
I know this is unlikely, but it is possible. 
 
The etas just tell what value is estimated, its not the whole story about how 
infomative an estimation is.  I dont think you can do
this without considering how 'certian' you are of each of those eta values.
 
Douglas Eleveld

________________________________

Van: [email protected] namens Ribbing, Jakob
Verzonden: vr 21-8-2009 12:26
Aan: Pyry Välitalo; [email protected]
Onderwerp: RE: [NMusers] Calculating shrinkage when some etas are zero



Hi Pyry,

 

Yes, when calculating shrinkage or looking at eta-diagnostic plots it is often 
better to exclude etas from subjects that has no information on that parameter 
at all. For a PK model we would not include subjects that were only 
administered placebo (if PK is exogenous compound). In the same manner placebo 
subjects are not informative on the drug-effects parameters of a (PK-)PD model. 
These subjects have informative etas for the placebo-part of the PD model, but 
not on the drug-effects (etas on Emax, ED50, etc.). For any eta-diagnostics you 
can removed these etas based on design (placebo subject, IV dosing, et c) or 
the empirical-Bayes estimate of eta being zero.

 

Cheers

 

Jakob

 

________________________________

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Pyry Välitalo
Sent: 21 August 2009 10:45
To: [email protected]
Subject: [NMusers] Calculating shrinkage when some etas are zero

 

Hi all,

I saw this snippet of information on PsN-general mailing list.

Kajsa Harling wrote in PsN-general:
"I talked to the experts here about shrinkage. Apparently, sometimes an
individual's eta may be exactly 0 (no effect, placebo, you probably
understand this better than I do). These zeros should not be included in
the shrinkage calculation, but now they are (erroneously) in PsN."

This led me to wonder about the calculation of shrinkage. I decided to post 
here on nmusers, because my question mainly relates to NONMEM. I could not find 
previous discussions about this topic exactly.

As I understand, if a parameter with BSV is not used by some individuals, the 
etas for these individuals will be set to zero. An example would be a dataset 
with IV and oral dosing data. If oral absorption rate constant KA with BSV is 
estimated for this data, then all eta(KA) values for IV dosing group will be 
zero.

The shrinkage of etas is calculated as 
1-sd(etas)/omega 
If the etas that equal exactly zero would have to be removed from this equation 
then it would mean that NONMEM estimates the omega based on only those 
individuals who need it for the parameter in question, e.g. the omega(KA) would 
be estimated only based on the oral dosing group. Is this a correct 
interpretation for the rationale to leave out zero etas? 

I guess the inclusion of zero etas into shrinkage calculations significantly 
increases the estimate of shrinkage because the zero etas always reduce the 
sd(etas). As a practical example, suppose a dataset of 20 patients with oral 
and 20 patients with IV administration. Suppose NONMEM estimates an omega of 
0.4 for BSV of KA. Suppose the sd(etas) for oral group is 0.3 and thus sd(etas) 
for all patients is 0.3/sqrt(2) since the etas in IV group for KA are zero. 
Thus, as far as I know, PsN would currently calculate a shrinkage of 
1-(0.3/sqrt(2))/0.4=0.47.
Would it be more appropriate to manually calculate a shrinkage of 
1-0.3/0.4=0.25 instead?

All comments much appreciated.

Kind regards,
Pyry



Kajsa Harling wrote:

Dear Ethan,

I have also been away for a while, thank you for your patience.

I talked to the experts here about shrinkage. Apparently, sometimes an
individual's eta may be exactly 0 (no effect, placebo, you probably
understand this better than I do). These zeros should not be included in
the shrinkage calculation, but now they are (erroneously) in PsN.

Does this explain the discrepancy?

Then, the heading shrinkage_wres is incorrect, it should say
shrinkage_iwres (or eps) they say.

Comments are fine as long as they do not have commas in them. But this
is fixed in the latest release.

Best regards,
Kajsa





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