Pharmaceutical Statistics Using SAS

Chapter 6. Nonparametric Methods in Pharmaceutical Statistics

Paul Juneau^[]

^[] Paul Juneau is Associate Director, Nonclinical Statistics, Pfizer, USA.

Nonparametric, or distribution-free, statistical methods are very useful in the setting of pharmaceutical research. These methods afford data analysts the ability to relax some of the assumptions typically made by their Gaussian (normality-based) analogues. In some settings (e.g., drug discovery investigations), these assumptions may not be verifiable due to small sample sizes. In others, where larger sample sizes are employed (e.g., clinical trial settings), the assumption of a Gaussian (normal) distribution is not met because of the presence of heavy-tails in measurement response or a large degree ...