A model‐assisted design for partially or completely ordered groups

Abstract This paper proposes a trial design for locating group‐specific doses when groups are partially or completely ordered by dose sensitivity. Previous trial designs for partially ordered groups are model‐based, whereas the proposed method is model‐assisted, providing clinicians with a design that is simpler. The proposed method performs similarly to model‐based methods, providing simplicity without losing accuracy. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first paper on dose‐finding for partially ordered groups with convergence results. To generalize the proposed method, a framework is introduced that allows partial orders to be transferred to a grid format with a known ordering across rows but an unknown ordering within rows.