Max-min multiple comparison procedure for comparing several dose levels with a zero dose control

Abstract

The comparison of increasing doses of a compound to a zero dose control is of interest in medical and toxicological studies. Assume that the mean dose effects are non-decreasing among the non-zero doses of the compound. A simple procedure that modifies Dunnett's procedure is proposed to construct simultaneous confidence intervals for pairwise comparisons of each dose group with the zero dose control by utilizing the ordering of the means. The simultaneous lower bounds and upper bounds by the new procedure are monotone, which is not the case with Dunnett's procedure. This is useful to categorize dose levels. The expected gains of the new procedure over Dunnett's procedure are studied. The procedure is shown by real data to compare well with its predecessor.

Keywords:

• Dunnett's procedure
• simultaneous confidence intervals

Acknowledgements

We thank the editor and a referee for helpful suggestions that considerably improved the presentation of this article. This work was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, for Lee and Peng.