title: Robust estimation of the median lethal dose.
abstract: Alternatives to M-estimation for robust estimation of the median lethal dose in biological assays are developed. A class of link functions based on the Student-t distribution is proposed, where degrees of freedom are estimated from the data by maximum likelihood. Other alternatives include slash and finite mixture distributions. For bioassays from a pharmaceutical company, these methods extend the standard probit and logistic models, as well as the Huber's M-estimator. They are also applied to several standard examples from the literature.
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics, University College Dublin, Belfield, Ireland. gabrielle.kelly@ucd.ie
authors.forename: G E
authors.initials: GE
authors.lastname: Kelly
authors.forename: J K
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Lindsey
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001681:Biological Assay / Q000379:methods / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D004305:Dose-Response Relationship, Drug; D007928:Lethal Dose 50; D051379:Mice; D013223:Statistics as Topic