Related papers: Simulation study of estimating between-study varia…
In many biological applications, the primary objective of study is to quantify the magnitude of treatment effect between two groups. Cohens'd or strictly standardized mean difference (SSMD) can be used to measure effect size however, it is…
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…
The DerSimonian-Laird (DL) weighted average method has been widely used for estimation of a pooled effect size from an aggregated data meta-analysis study. It is mainly criticized for its underestimation of the standard error of the pooled…
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…
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…
Random-effects models are frequently used to synthesise information from different studies in meta-analysis. While likelihood-based inference is attractive both in terms of limiting properties and of implementation, its application in…
Quantifying the heterogeneity is an important issue in meta-analysis, and among the existing measures, the $I^2$ statistic is most commonly used. In this paper, we first illustrate with a simple example that the $I^2$ statistic is heavily…
In cluster-randomized trials, generalized linear mixed models and generalized estimating equations have conventionally been the default analytic methods for estimating the average treatment effect as routine practice. However, recent…
Statistical inference about the average effect in random-effects meta-analysis has been considered insufficient in the presence of substantial between-study heterogeneity. Predictive distributions are well-suited for quantifying…
While randomized trials may be the gold standard for evaluating the effectiveness of the treatment intervention, in some special circumstances, single-arm clinical trials utilizing external control may be considered. The causal treatment…
We consider the problem of meta-analyzing two-group studies that report the median of the outcome. Often, these studies are excluded from meta-analysis because there are no well-established statistical methods to pool the difference of…
Subgroup-specific meta-analysis synthesizes treatment effects for patient subgroups across randomized trials. Methods include joint or separate modeling of subgroup effects and treatment-by-subgroup interactions, but inconsistencies arise…
Prediction intervals are commonly used in meta-analysis with random-effects models. One widely used method, the Higgins-Thompson-Spiegelhalter prediction interval, replaces the heterogeneity parameter with its point estimate, but its…
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…
When conducting a meta-analysis of standardized mean differences (SMDs), it is common to assume equal variances in the two arms of each study. This leads to Cohen's $d$ estimates for which interpretation is simple. However, this simplicity…
Comparative binary outcome data are of fundamental interest in statistics and are often pooled in meta-analyses. Here we examine the simplest case where for each study there are two patient groups and a binary event of interest, giving rise…
We develop and evaluate point and interval estimates for the random effects $\theta_i$, having made observations $y_i|\theta_i\stackrel{\m athit{ind}}{\sim}N[\theta_i,V_i],i=1,...,k$ that follow a two-level Normal hierarchical model.…
The era of big data is coming, and evidence-based medicine is attracting increasing attention to improve decision making in medical practice via integrating evidence from well designed and conducted clinical research. Meta-analysis is a…
The restricted mean survival time (RMST) difference offers an interpretable causal contrast to estimate the treatment effect for time-to-event outcomes, yet a wide range of available estimators leaves limited guidance for practice. We…
Background: When conducting a meta-analysis of a continuous outcome, estimated means and standard deviations from the selected studies are required in order to obtain an overall estimate of the mean effect and its confidence interval. If…