Imbalance control in clinical trial subject randomization —from philosophy to strategy

Randomized controlled clinical trial (RCT) is considered the gold standard for efficacy evaluation of medical treatments, as well as for many other types of empirical research [1,2]. The core characteristic of RCT is the random treatment assignment, which 1) protects the integrity of trial results against selection bias and 2) provides the foundation for statistical analyses of trial data. Unrestricted randomization is rarely used in practice. Various restricted randomization designs have been proposed in the literature to control the imbalances in the sizes of and the baseline covariate distributions among the treatment groups, motivated by an effort to ensure the comparability of the treatment groups.
Source: Journal of Clinical Epidemiology - Category: Epidemiology Authors: Tags: Commentary Source Type: research