group-sequential-methods

group-sequential-methods is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from choxos/BiostatAgent. It costs 34 tokens per session (2,444 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of methods for designing clinical trials with planned interim analyses. Group sequential designs allow a trial to stop early when results show success or when success appears unlikely.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design interim looks, implement alpha-spending functions, set efficacy or futility boundaries, calculate information fractions, and run group sequential simulations with sim_gs_n() and gsDesign2.
Why use it?
It explains how to set stopping rules while controlling the trial's overall false-positive rate. It also defines information fractions, which show how much statistical information has accumulated at each interim analysis.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the clinical-trial-simulation plugin — 7 skills, 5 commands, 7 agents shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/choxos/biostatagent/group-sequential-methods
Any agent
npx skills add choxos/BiostatAgent --skill group-sequential-methods
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/choxos/BiostatAgent

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install clinical-trial-simulation, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills, 5 commands, 7 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for group-sequential-methods

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/choxos/biostatagent/group-sequential-methods.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/choxos/biostatagent/group-sequential-methods)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/choxos/biostatagent/group-sequential-methods"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/choxos/biostatagent/group-sequential-methods.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,444 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00034 $0.02444
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.01222
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00489
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00244

Measured 3d ago against content hash 20c699a4513a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

group-sequential-methods scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/clinical-trial-simulation/skills/group-sequential-methods/SKILL.md · 347 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 347 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Group Sequential Methods

When to Use This Skill

  • Designing group sequential trials with interim analyses
  • Implementing alpha spending functions
  • Setting futility stopping rules
  • Calculating information fractions
  • Using sim_gs_n() for GS simulations
  • Integrating with gsDesign2 package

Fundamental Concepts

Group Sequential Design

A group sequential design allows for:

  • Early stopping for efficacy: If treatment effect is larger than expected
  • Early stopping for futility: If treatment effect is unlikely to reach significance
  • Reduced expected sample size: When treatment effect is present

Information Fraction

Information fraction at analysis k:

I_k / I_K = (events at analysis k) / (total planned events)

For time-to-event trials, information ≈ number of events.

Type I Error Spending

The key constraint is that the design controls the overall Type I error at the planned alpha level. Spending functions define cumulative alpha spending over information time, and boundaries are derived using the joint distribution of sequential test statistics. They are not obtained by simply assigning independent nominal alpha levels to each look.

Alpha Spending Functions

O'Brien-Fleming (OBF)

Properties:

  • Conservative at early analyses
  • Nearly full alpha at final analysis
  • Difficult to stop early
  • Maintains nominal Type I error

Formula:

α*(t) = 2 - 2Φ(z_{α/2} / √t)

When to Use:

  • Want maximum power at final analysis
  • Early efficacy stopping unlikely
  • Regulatory preference for conservative early bounds

Pocock

Properties:

  • Equal spending at each analysis
  • Easier to stop early
  • Inflated final alpha
  • Lower power at final analysis

Formula:

α*(t) = α × log(1 + (e-1)t)

When to Use:

  • Early stopping is a priority
  • Treatment effect expected to be large
  • Willing to sacrifice final analysis power

Hwang-Shih-DeCani (HSD)

Properties:

  • Flexible family indexed by γ
  • γ = -4: Similar to OBF
  • γ = 1: Similar to Pocock
  • γ = 0: Linear (Pocock-like)

Read the full file on GitHub · 347 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 347 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 20c699a4513a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

group-sequential-methods is a skill published in the GitHub repository choxos/BiostatAgent (11 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 2,444 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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