Re: NONMEM

From: Nick Holford n.holford@auckland.ac.nz Subject: Re: [NMusers] NONMEM Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 08:31:05 +1200 Steve, If I may split the academic hair a little more ... I suspect that in fact your collaborators would have initially asked you for an 'optimal design' i.e. these are the words they would have used when asking you to help them. But you would have offered a 'sufficient design' as being good enough. I accept that methods based on the Fisher information matrix (FIM) are much faster than brute force Monte Carlo (MC) methods but the FIM methods are limited to minimizing parameter precision as the objective. There are other objectives for trial design e.g. power, which can be (tediously) explored using MC methods but which are only indirectly optimized using FIM methods. Nick -- Nick Holford, Dept Pharmacology & Clinical Pharmacology University of Auckland, 85 Park Rd, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand email:n.holford@auckland.ac.nz tel:+64(9)373-7599x86730 fax:373-7556 http://www.health.auckland.ac.nz/pharmacology/staff/nholford/