In this EBM Hub edition, we use the interesting, prospective, randomized, double-blinded study of Min et al from this current issue of Aesthetic Surgery Journal as a springboard to address a key methodological issue that is important in the proper execution and reporting of a randomized, controlled trial: themethod of randomization. Randomization is among our most powerful protective mechanisms...

Caches hide the growing latency of accesses to the main memory from the processor by storing the most recently used data on-chip. To limit the search time through the caches, they are organized in a direct mapped or set-associative way. Such an organization introduces many conflict misses that hamper performance. This paper studies randomizing set index functions, a technique to place the data ...

In sensory experiments, often designs are used that are balanced for carryover effects. It is hoped that this controls for possible carryover effects, like, e.g., a lingering taste of the products. Proper randomization is essential to guarantee the usual model assumption of independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) errors. We consider a randomization procedure that permutes treatment labels ...

BACKGROUND When planning a randomized controlled trial (RCT), investigators must select randomization and allocation procedures based upon a variety of factors. While third party randomization is cited as being among the most desirable randomization processes, many third party randomization procedures are neither feasible nor cost-effective for small RCTs, including pilot RCTs. In this study we...

Abstract I study the minimax-optimal design for a two-arm controlled experiment where conditional mean outcomes vary in given set and objective is effect-estimation precision. When this permutation symmetric, optimal shown to be complete randomization. Notably, even when has structure (i.e., not symmetric), being precision still requires randomization beyond single partition of units, that is, ...

In ERP studies, the comparison of topographies (multichannel measurements) or whole spatiotemporal data matrices (multichannel time series of measurements), the classical statistical tests very often cannot be used. It is argued that, for these comparisons, randomization tests are an excellent alternative. It is also argued that the randomization test is superior to another resampling method, t...

Raiffa (1961) criticizes ambiguity-averse preferences by claiming that hedging is possible with randomization of choices. We argue that the timing of randomization is crucial for hedging: If the decision maker thinks that the randomization is ex ante (i.e., before a realization of a state) then it provides no hedging; if it is ex post (i.e., after a realization of a state) then it provides hedg...

Media Access Control (MAC) address randomization is a privacy technique whereby mobile devices rotate through random hardware addresses in order to prevent observers from singling out their traffic or physical location from other nearby devices. Adoption of this technology, however, has been sporadic and varied across device manufacturers. In this paper, we present the first wide-scale study of...

We demonstrate that clinical trials using response adaptive randomized treatment assignment rules are subject to substantial bias if there are time trends in unknown prognostic factors and standard methods of analysis are used. We develop a general class of randomization tests based on generating the null distribution of a general test statistic by repeating the adaptive randomized treatment as...

While the evaluation of intervention effects in single-case research has relied on visual inspection of the data (Kazdin, 1980), the description of graphical forms are not considered an adequate substitute for statistical tests (Edgington, 1980). Moreover, there are cases when graphical displays of data tend to be quite ambiguous and treatment effects are not easily appreciated (Ferron & Sentov...