This paper investigates a likelihood-based approach in meta-analysis of clinical trials involving the baseline risk as explanatory variable. The approach takes account of the errors affecting the measure of either the treatment effect and the baseline risk, while facing the potential misspecification of the baseline risk distribution. To this aim, we suggest to model the baseline risk through a flexible family of distributions represented by the skew- normal. We describe how to carry out inference within this framework and evaluate the performance of the approach through simulation. The method is compared to the routine likelihood approach based on the restrictive normality assumption for the baseline risk distribution and to the weighted least squares regression. The competing approaches are applied to the analysis of two published datasets.

Flexibly modelling the baseline risk in meta-analysis

GUOLO, ANNAMARIA
2013-01-01

Abstract

This paper investigates a likelihood-based approach in meta-analysis of clinical trials involving the baseline risk as explanatory variable. The approach takes account of the errors affecting the measure of either the treatment effect and the baseline risk, while facing the potential misspecification of the baseline risk distribution. To this aim, we suggest to model the baseline risk through a flexible family of distributions represented by the skew- normal. We describe how to carry out inference within this framework and evaluate the performance of the approach through simulation. The method is compared to the routine likelihood approach based on the restrictive normality assumption for the baseline risk distribution and to the weighted least squares regression. The competing approaches are applied to the analysis of two published datasets.
2013
baseline risk; likelihood; measurement error; meta-analysis; sandwich variance estimator; skew-normal distribution
File in questo prodotto:
Non ci sono file associati a questo prodotto.

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11562/430621
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus ND
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? ND
social impact