October 9, 2013

Prediction is hard

How good are sales predictions for newly approved drugs?

Not very (via Derek Lowe at  In the Pipeline)

Forecasts

There’s a wide spread around the true value. There’s less than a 50:50 chance of being within 40%, and a substantial chance of being insanely overoptimistic. Derek Lowe continues

Now, those numbers are all derived from forecasts in the year before the drugs launched. But surely things get better once the products got out into the market? Well, there was a trend for lower errors, certainly, but the forecasts were still (for example) off by 40% five years after the launch. The authors also say that forecasts for later drugs in a particular class were no more accurate than the ones for the first-in-class compounds. All of this really, really makes a person want to ask if all that time and effort that goes into this process is doing anyone any good at all.

 

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »