Empirical Comparison of Five Parametric Curves in Fifty Dose-Response Studies

One of the most common parametric curves used for dose response modeling and target dose estimation is the Emax model. Previous meta-analyses have shown that the Emax provides an adequate description of the dose-response relationship for many studies, but direct comparisons with other model families were not reported. We addressed two questions in this paper. First, does any one model family obtain superior fits to the data across many dose response studies? Second, which model families should generally be included in the candidate model set? We performed an exploratory analysis to quantitatively compare goodness-of-fit between the Emax and competing two- and three-parameter model families. No single model family obtained the best penalized fit in most studies. While the Log-linear model often yielded the lowest information criterion, a cluster analysis revealed that the Emax model achieved the most robust fit across studies.