Abstract

Many current dose-response methods assume a parametric shape of some form and do not accommodate comparisons between methods. Motivated by a need to be able to compare dose-response curves without assuming a parametric shape to the dose-response curve, we applied our technique to model them by non-parametric smoothing methods and also estimate area under the curves. Given that we do not know the distribution of the area under the smoothed curve, we re-formulated the F-test to compare the areas between curves. We demonstrate this method on several actual datasets from immunology which have dose-response data. This demonstration shows that this method can easily be employed to model dose-response curves and compare them between groups with multiple visits, which will provide a useful tool for this concept and hopefully in the future for dose-response relationships in gene mapping.

Keywords: Dose-response, smoothing, area under curve, F-test, non-parametric