SMARTAR: an R package for designing and analyzing Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trials

This article introduces an R package, SMARTAR (Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial with Adaptive Randomization), by which clinical investigators can design and analyze a sequential multiple assignment randomized trial (SMART) for comparing adaptive treatment strategies. Adaptive treatment strategies are commonly used in clinical practice to personalize healthcare in chronic disorder management. SMART is an efficient clinical design for selecting the best adaptive treatment strategy from a family of candidates. Although some R packages can help in adaptive treatment strategies research, they mainly focus on secondary data analysis for observational studies, instead of clinical trials. SMARTAR is the first R package provides functions that can support clinical investigators and data analysts at every step of the statistical work pipeline in clinical trial practice. In this article, we demonstrate how to use this package, using a real data example.