ترغب بنشر مسار تعليمي؟ اضغط هنا

A Bootstrap Based Between-Study Heterogeneity Test in Meta-Analysis

103   0   0.0 ( 0 )
 نشر من قبل Han Du
 تاريخ النشر 2020
  مجال البحث الاحصاء الرياضي
والبحث باللغة English




اسأل ChatGPT حول البحث

Meta-analysis combines pertinent information from existing studies to provide an overall estimate of population parameters/effect sizes, as well as to quantify and explain the differences between studies. However, testing the between-study heterogeneity is one of the most troublesome topics in meta-analysis research. Additionally, no methods have been proposed to test whether the size of the heterogeneity is larger than a specific level. The existing methods, such as the Q test and likelihood ratio (LR) tests, are criticized for their failure to control the Type I error rate and/or failure to attain enough statistical power. Although better reference distribution approximations have been proposed in the literature, the expression is complicated and the application is limited. In this article, we propose bootstrap based heterogeneity tests combining the restricted maximum likelihood (REML) ratio test or Q test with bootstrap procedures, denoted as B-REML-LRT and B-Q respectively. Simulation studies were conducted to examine and compare the performance of the proposed methods with the regular LR tests, the regular Q test, and the improved Q test in both the random-effects meta-analysis and mixed-effects meta-analysis. Based on the results of Type I error rates and statistical power, B-Q is recommended. An R package mathtt{boot.heterogeneity} is provided to facilitate the implementation of the proposed method.



قيم البحث

اقرأ أيضاً

In the genomic era, the identification of gene signatures associated with disease is of significant interest. Such signatures are often used to predict clinical outcomes in new patients and aid clinical decision-making. However, recent studies have s hown that gene signatures are often not replicable. This occurrence has practical implications regarding the generalizability and clinical applicability of such signatures. To improve replicability, we introduce a novel approach to select gene signatures from multiple datasets whose effects are consistently non-zero and account for between-study heterogeneity. We build our model upon some rank-based quantities, facilitating integration over different genomic datasets. A high dimensional penalized Generalized Linear Mixed Model (pGLMM) is used to select gene signatures and address data heterogeneity. We compare our method to some commonly used strategies that select gene signatures ignoring between-study heterogeneity. We provide asymptotic results justifying the performance of our method and demonstrate its advantage in the presence of heterogeneity through thorough simulation studies. Lastly, we motivate our method through a case study subtyping pancreatic cancer patients from four gene expression studies.
Quantifying the heterogeneity is an important issue in meta-analysis, and among the existing measures, the $I^2$ statistic is the most commonly used measure in the literature. In this paper, we show that the $I^2$ statistic was, in fact, defined as p roblematic or even completely wrong from the very beginning. To confirm this statement, we first present a motivating example to show that the $I^2$ statistic is heavily dependent on the study sample sizes, and consequently it may yield contradictory results for the amount of heterogeneity. Moreover, by drawing a connection between ANOVA and meta-analysis, the $I^2$ statistic is shown to have, mistakenly, applied the sampling errors of the estimators rather than the variances of the study populations. Inspired by this, we introduce an Intrinsic measure for Quantifying the heterogeneity in meta-analysis, and meanwhile study its statistical properties to clarify why it is superior to the existing measures. We further propose an optimal estimator, referred to as the IQ statistic, for the new measure of heterogeneity that can be readily applied in meta-analysis. Simulations and real data analysis demonstrate that the IQ statistic provides a nearly unbiased estimate of the true heterogeneity and it is also independent of the study sample sizes.
Small study effects occur when smaller studies show different, often larger, treatment effects than large ones, which may threaten the validity of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The most well-known reasons for small study effects include publi cation bias, outcome reporting bias and clinical heterogeneity. Methods to account for small study effects in univariate meta-analysis have been extensively studied. However, detecting small study effects in a multivariate meta-analysis setting remains an untouched research area. One of the complications is that different types of selection processes can be involved in the reporting of multivariate outcomes. For example, some studies may be completely unpublished while others may selectively report multiple outcomes. In this paper, we propose a score test as an overall test of small study effects in multivariate meta-analysis. Two detailed case studies are given to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed test over various naive applications of univariate tests in practice. Through simulation studies, the proposed test is found to retain nominal Type I error with considerable power in moderate sample size settings. Finally, we also evaluate the concordance between the proposed test with the naive application of univariate tests by evaluating 44 systematic reviews with multiple outcomes from the Cochrane Database.
In a network meta-analysis, some of the collected studies may deviate markedly from the others, for example having very unusual effect sizes. These deviating studies can be regarded as outlying with respect to the rest of the network and can be influ ential on the pooled results. Thus, it could be inappropriate to synthesize those studies without further investigation. In this paper, we propose two Bayesian methods to detect outliers in a network meta-analysis via: (a) a mean-shifted outlier model and (b), posterior predictive p-values constructed from ad-hoc discrepancy measures. The former method uses Bayes factors to formally test each study against outliers while the latter provides a score of outlyingness for each study in the network, which allows to numerically quantify the uncertainty associated with being outlier. Furthermore, we present a simple method based on informative priors as part of the network meta-analysis model to down-weight the detected outliers. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology while comparing it to some alternative, available outlier diagnostic tools. Two real networks of interventions are then used to demonstrate our methods in practice.
Smart metering infrastructures collect data almost continuously in the form of fine-grained long time series. These massive time series often have common daily patterns that are repeated between similar days or seasons and shared between grouped mete rs. Within this context, we propose a method to highlight individuals with abnormal daily dependency patterns, which we term evolution outliers. To this end, we approach the problem from the standpoint of Functional Data Analysis (FDA), by treating each daily record as a function or curve. We then focus on the morphological aspects of the observed curves, such as daily magnitude, daily shape, derivatives, and inter-day evolution. The proposed method for evolution outliers relies on the concept of functional depth, which has been a cornerstone in the literature of FDA to build shape and magnitude outlier detection methods. In conjunction with our evolution outlier proposal, these methods provide an outlier detection toolbox for smart meter data that covers a wide palette of functional outliers classes. We illustrate the outlier identification ability of this toolbox using actual smart metering data corresponding to photovoltaic energy generation and circuit voltage records.
التعليقات
جاري جلب التعليقات جاري جلب التعليقات
سجل دخول لتتمكن من متابعة معايير البحث التي قمت باختيارها
mircosoft-partner

هل ترغب بارسال اشعارات عن اخر التحديثات في شمرا-اكاديميا