Related papers: Meta-analysis of few small studies in orphan disea…
Standard random-effects meta-analysis methods perform poorly when applied to few studies only. Such settings however are commonly encountered in practice. It is unclear, whether or to what extent small-sample-size behaviour can be improved…
Systematic reviews aim to summarize all the available evidence relevant to a particular research question. If appropriate, the data from identified studies are quantitatively combined in a meta-analysis. Often only few studies regarding a…
Meta-analyses of clinical trials targeting rare events face particular challenges when the data lack adequate numbers of events for all treatment arms. Especially when the number of studies is low, standard meta-analysis methods can lead to…
The normal-normal hierarchical model (NNHM) constitutes a simple and widely used framework for meta-analysis. In the common case of only few studies contributing to the meta-analysis, standard approaches to inference tend to perform poorly,…
Random-effects meta-analyses are used to combine evidence of treatment effects from multiple studies. Since treatment effects may vary across trials due to differences in study characteristics, heterogeneity in treatment effects between…
The prediction interval has been increasingly used in meta-analyses as a useful measure for assessing the magnitude of treatment effect and between-studies heterogeneity. In calculations of the prediction interval, although the…
In Bayesian meta-analysis, the specification of prior probabilities for the between-study heterogeneity is commonly required, and is of particular benefit in situations where only few studies are included. Among the considerations in the…
Random effects meta-analysis is a widely applied methodology to synthetize research findings of studies in a specific scientific question. Besides estimating the mean effect, an important aim of the meta-analysis is to summarize the…
Clinical research and drug development in orphan diseases is challenging, since large-scale randomized studies are difficult to conduct. Formally synthesizing the evidence is therefore of great value, yet this is rarely done in the drug…
[See paper for full abstract] Meta-analysis is a crucial tool for answering scientific questions. It is usually conducted on a relatively small amount of ``trusted'' data -- ideally from randomized, controlled trials -- which allow causal…
Bayesian model-averaged meta-analysis allows quantification of evidence for both treatment effectiveness $\mu$ and across-study heterogeneity $\tau$. We use the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews to develop discipline-wide empirical…
Recent work has made important contributions in the development of causally-interpretable meta-analysis. These methods transport treatment effects estimated in a collection of randomized trials to a target population of interest. Ideally,…
To investigate intervention effects on rare events, meta-analysis techniques are commonly applied in order to assess the accumulated evidence. When it comes to adverse effects in clinical trials, these are often most adequately handled…
Meta-analysis can be formulated as combining $p$-values across studies into a joint $p$-value function, from which point estimates and confidence intervals can be derived. We extend the meta-analytic estimation framework based on combined…
Rich meta-epidemiological data sets have been collected to explore associations between intervention effect estimates and study-level characteristics. Welton et al. proposed models for the analysis of meta-epidemiological data, but these…
Random-effects meta-analyses are widely used for evidence synthesis in medical research. However, conventional methods based on large-sample approximations often exhibit poor performance in case of very few studies (e.g., 2 to 4), which is…
Evaluating treatment effect heterogeneity widely informs treatment decision making. At the moment, much emphasis is placed on the estimation of the conditional average treatment effect via flexible machine learning algorithms. While these…
Background: Pairwise and network meta-analyses using fixed effect and random effects models are commonly applied to synthesise evidence from randomised controlled trials. The models differ in their assumptions and the interpretation of the…
We outline a Bayesian model-averaged meta-analysis for standardized mean differences in order to quantify evidence for both treatment effectiveness $\delta$ and across-study heterogeneity $\tau$. We construct four competing models by…
Random effects meta-analysis is widely used for synthesizing studies under the assumption that underlying effects come from a normal distribution. However, under certain conditions the use of alternative distributions might be more…