An Assessment of Up-and-Down Designs and Associated Estimators in Phase I Trials

In this article, we consider some up-and-down designs that are discussed in Ivanova et al. (2003) for estimating the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) in phase I trials: the biased coin design, k-in-a-row rule, Narayana rule, and continual reassessment method (CRM). A large-scale Monte Carlo simulation study, which is substantially more extensive than Ivanova et al. (2003), is conducted to examine the performance of these five designs for different …