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Dear All, We are pleased to announce that the next meeting of the Royal Statistical Society's Lancashire local group will take place on Thursday 2nd June. The meeting will be held 16:00 – 17:00pm at Lancaster University (Room A54, Postgraduate Statistics Centre) and will be followed by a wine reception in the Postgraduate Statistics Centre. All are welcome to attend. Speaker: Sofia Villar (MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge) Title: The multi-armed bandit problem and the design of Bayesian adaptive clinical trials: recent advances and remaining challenges ----- The "classic" multi-armed bandit problem (MABP) is an idealized mathematical decision framework for deciding how to optimally allocate a scarce resource (e.g. patients) among a number of competing uses (e.g. alternative treatments), given that such allocation is to be done sequentially and under randomly evolving conditions. Its roots date back to work produced by Thompson in 1933 but since the first publication of the optimal solution of the classic MABP in the early 1970s by a dynamic index rule in work by Gittins and Jones, the bandit literature quickly diversified and emerged as an active research topic. Across this literature, the use of bandit models to optimally design clinical trials became a typical motivating application, yet little of the resulting theory has ever been used in the actual design and analysis of clinical trials. In recent years, the potential use of adaptive designs that use accrued data to improve clinical trials has attracted much attention both from methodologists and practitioners. Patient allocation rules based on the MABP can be considered as a Bayesian adaptive design. In this talk I will present recent results that illustrate the reasons why the implementation of this approach in practice could be desirable and in which circumstances. I will describe some recent modifications to the original method that aim at overcoming specific practical limitations to its use and I will discuss the remaining methodological challenges that need to be addressed. Best Wishes, Rhian Davies RSS Local Group Secretary Lancashire http://www.rss-lancashire.org.uk/<http://www.rss-lancashire.org.uk/events> You may leave the list at any time by sending the command SIGNOFF allstat to [log in to unmask], leaving the subject line blank.