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Title: Optimising dynamic treatment regimens using sequential multiple assignment randomised trial data with missing data

Background: Clinicians often face multi-stage and dynamic decisions when treating patients with either chronic or progressive medical conditions. Dynamic treatment regimens formalise such sequential decision problems. Sequential multiple assignment randomised trials (SMARTs) are clinical studies that randomise patients to different treatments over time, which provides data that can be used to optimise dynamic treatment regimens. But repeatedly randomising patients to treatments can lead to complicated patterns of missing data, a problem with few existing SMART-specific solutions. This PhD project will develop and evaluate statistical methods to optimise dynamic treatment regimens using data from hypothetical SMART designs with problematic missing data.