Related papers: Investigating the heterogeneity of "study twins"
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…
To improve confounder adjustments, observational studies are often matched on potential confounders. While matched case-control studies are common and well covered in the literature, our focus here is on matched cohort studies, which are…
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…
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…
Meta-analysis is an important tool for combining results from multiple studies and has been widely used in evidence-based medicine for several decades. This paper reports, for the first time, an interesting and valuable paradox in…
Meta-analysis is routinely performed in many scientific disciplines. This analysis is attractive since discoveries are possible even when all the individual studies are underpowered. However, the meta-analytic discoveries may be entirely…
We propose a framework for testing the homogeneity of conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) across multiple experimental and observational studies. Our approach leverages multiple randomized trials to assess whether treatment…
Meta-analysis employs statistical techniques to synthesize the results of individual studies, providing an estimate of the overall effect size for a specific outcome of interest. The direction and magnitude of this estimate, along with its…
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…
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…
According to Davey et al. (2011) with a total of 22,453 meta-analyses from the January 2008 Issue of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, the median number of studies included in each meta-analysis is only three. In other words,…
Case-mix heterogeneity across studies complicates meta-analyses. As a result of this, treatments that are equally effective on patient subgroups may appear to have different effectiveness on patient populations with different case mix. It…
Meta-analysis, by synthesizing effect estimates from multiple studies conducted in diverse settings, stands at the top of the evidence hierarchy in clinical research. Yet, conventional approaches based on fixed- or random-effects models…
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…
As the most important tool to provide high-level evidence-based medicine, researchers can statistically summarize and combine data from multiple studies by conducting meta-analysis. In meta-analysis, mean differences are frequently used…
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…
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…
A fundamental limitation of causal inference in observational studies is that perceived evidence for an effect might instead be explained by factors not accounted for in the primary analysis. Methods for assessing the sensitivity of a…
Longitudinal data tracking repeated measurements on individuals are highly valued for research because they offer controls for unmeasured individual heterogeneity that might otherwise bias results. Random effects or mixed models approaches,…
There is strong interest in estimating how the magnitude of treatment effects of an intervention vary across sub-groups of the population of interest. In our paper, we propose a two-study approach to first propose and then test…