Biostatistics Researchers Win Best Paper Award for Work on Comparing Nonrandomized Groups

A Georgetown Biostatistics Ph.D. alumna and faculty have been chosen for a 2025 Best Paper Award from Statistics in Biosciences, the peer-reviewed journal of the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA).

Anqi Yin (‘22) is the first author of “Doubly Robust Semiparametric Estimation for Multi-group Causal Comparisons,” which proposes a robust statistical method for more accurately assessing the benefit of treatments in clinical trials with nonrandomized groups.

In clinical trials, it’s not always ethical or even possible to randomly divide patients between the experimental and control groups, explained Biostatistics department chair Ming Tan, who worked on the paper with Yin and professor Ao Yuan. For example, an experimental therapy might be patients’ only chance at recovery, obliging clinicians to offer it to all patients and compare their outcomes to an external control group. Or in the case of a rare disease, there might not be enough patients available for proper randomization.

Yin, Tan and Yuan’s new robust statistical method seeks to reduce assumptions in estimating the differences between groups of patients in a clinical trial, yielding a less biased estimate of the treatment’s benefits.

The researchers applied their new method to various studies, including the longitudinal NHANES I Epidemiologic Follow-up Study (NHEFS) and an ocular melanoma study with an external control. Their research was partially supported by an NIH grant to develop the methodology.
The Best Paper Award, established in 2021, recognizes up to three papers published in Statistics in Biosciences in the previous year. The Georgetown co-authors will receive a $1,000 prize and are invited to give a talk at the 2025 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium in Connecticut in June.