Modified Robust Meta-Analytic-Predictive Priors for Incorporating Historical Controls in Clinical Trials

Incorporating historical information in clinical trials has been of much interest recently because of its potential to reduce the size and cost of clinical trials. Data-conflict is one of the biggest challenges in incorporating historical information. In order to address the conflict between historical data and current data, several methods have been proposed including the robust meta-analytic-predictive (rMAP) prior method. In this paper, we propose to modify the rMAP prior method by using an empirical Bayes approach to estimate the weights for the two components of the rMAP prior. Via numerical calculations, we show that this modification to the rMAP method improves its performance regarding multiple key metrics.