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I am trying to learn a bit about the analysis of categorical data. I have a problem with one of the assignments.
Drug treatment A was found effective 70% of the time (66%, 74%) in the previous 8-month study. Two new drugs (B and C) have been developed that are claimed will successfully treat the drug within 3 months. A study was conducted to compare these two new drugs. Patients were assigned at random and double blind to take either treatment B or C.
The task is to simply find and elaborate on the best treatment. The results of the study have the following results.

            y
Treatment   0   1
        B  81  53
        C 100  39   
 structure(c(81L, 100L, 53L, 39L), .Dim = c(2L, 2L), .Dimnames = list(
    Treatment = c("B", "C"), y = c("0", "1")), class = "table")

What is an appropriate approach/test to compare these drugs? Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer 1

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Assuming that the samples are not biased in favour of any of the drugs, you can try to calculate the 95% confidence interval for each of the new drugs and check whether or not they intersect with the (66%-74%) you had for drug A.

I didn't do the math precisely, but The results will look something like (32%-48%) for drug B and (22%-38%) for drug C. I think a larger sample would really help

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  • $\begingroup$ I was afraid that it might be that simple. I am just unsure about your estimates because I got them much lower because 0s are non-effective treatments. $\endgroup$
    – m_c
    Commented Feb 24, 2019 at 18:40
  • $\begingroup$ Oops! You are absolutelly right! My confidence interval are of course for the 0 class!! $\endgroup$
    – David
    Commented Feb 25, 2019 at 7:28
  • $\begingroup$ Maybe just edit your answer for future readers. $\endgroup$
    – m_c
    Commented Feb 25, 2019 at 9:35

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