Lag-time with NONMEM and nlmixr2

By Matt Fidler and the nlmixr2 Development Team in nlmixr2

November 10, 2022

This is more of a methodology post, pointing out how things are done in nlmixr2 and how it likely doesn’t match what is done in NONMEM (and at least one reason why a drop-in replacement of rxode2 by another tool like PKPDsim, mrgsolve, or deSolve is not an easy project).

For the impatient, adding focei lag time (and other dose-based events) have improved in stability for this release of nlmixr2.

A little background about focei

Gradients and Sensitivities

One of the differences between focei and saem is that focei needs gradients to determine the best solution for the individual and for the population best fit. (For the population fit you may not need the gradient depending on the outer optimization method, for example outerOpt="bobyqa" does not need gradients).

For nlmixr2 (and likely for NONMEM, based on some discussions with others) the gradients for each individual are calculated based on the forward sensitivity equations.

These forward sensitivity equations expand the ODE systems with extra compartments. Each extra compartment will give the gradient of the original compartment with respect to one of the between subject variability (or etas). This means that the ODE system is expanded by the number of ODEs in the original system multiplied by the number etas in the system (hence the stability of focei is dependent on the number of etas and ODEs in the original problem). The forward sensitivities also has a way to handle changes in initial conditions.

As an aside, this needed sensitivity expansion is one (of a few) reasons why nlmixr2 and rxode2 are bound so tightly together (and other tools cannot be easily used or adapted).

Where sensitivities fall short

What the method cannot handle is parameter-based changes in dosing. This includes lag-time, bio-availability, as well as modeled duration of infusion or modeled rate of infusion in nlmixr2 models.

These are types of gradients are undetermined by pure forward sensitivities. The last few releases of nlmixr2 took the first observation and tried to figure out the best step-size to calculate the gradients for the whole individual based on the Gill, Murray, Saunders, and Wright (1) method.

New method for handling dose-based sensitivities

Now in nlmixr2, we use the method proposed in Shi et al (2) (https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2110.06380). This method is extended so that instead of optimizing the gradient of one rate, we take the harmonic mean of all the calculated rates for each observation and optimize the best step size for that value (which is the same method we use for the Hessian calculation in the generalized log-likelihood).

In our testing of lag-times, this seems to perform better than the previous method.

Because this method was only proposed last year, I don’t believe that NONMEM uses this method. This is one of the many things that are different between NONMEM focei and nlmixr2 focei.

Overall conclusions

In my estimation, this should show:

  • Dose-related parameters perform better when they have etas than the did before the log-likelihood release

  • rxode2 integration is more than simply a solver you can replace with another solver.

  • NONMEM and nlmixr2, while producing similar objective functions for focei, have different internal choices and it should not be considered exactly identical. (ie nlmixr2 is not a R version of NONMEM)

References

1.
Gill PE, Murray W, Saunders MA, Wright MH. Computing Forward-Difference Intervals for Numerical Optimization. SIAM Journal on Scientific and Statistical Computing [Internet]. 1983 Jun;4(2):310–21. Available from: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1137/0904025
2.
Shi HJM, Xie Y, Xuan MQ, Nocedal J. Adaptive Finite-Difference Interval Estimation for Noisy Derivative-Free Optimization. SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing [Internet]. 2022 Oct;44(4):A2302–21. Available from: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06380v2
Posted on:
November 10, 2022
Length:
3 minute read, 595 words
Categories:
nlmixr2
Tags:
new-version
See Also:
nlmixr2 2.1.0/ rxode2 2.1.1
nonmem2rx and babelmixr2
nlmixr2 family releases