Skip to contents

A table with the hyperparameters of the predictive distributions for the between-study variance developed by Turner et al. (2015) and Rhodes et al. (2015): log-normal distribution and t-distribution (with 5 degrees of freedom) when the outcome data are analysed in the odds ratio or standardised mean difference scale, respectively.

Usage

table_tau2_prior(measure, area)

Arguments

measure

Character string indicating the effect measure with possible values "OR" for odds ratio and "SMD" for standardised mean difference.

area

Character string indicating the medical area relating to the predictive distributions for standardised mean difference with possible values "cancer" for medical areas of cancer, "respiratory" for medical areas of respiratory diseases, and "other" for medical areas other than cancer or respiratory diseases. The argument is not relevant for odds ratio.

Value

A cross-sectional table as a heatmap showing the hyperparameters (mean and standard deviation) of the corresponding predictive distribution for all combinations between the outcome types and treatment-comparison types and according to the selected medical area (only relevant with standardised mean difference) as defined by Turner et al. (2015) and Rhodes et al. (2015). The tiles are coloured with different shades according to the corresponding median value: the larger the median, the darker the colour.

Details

This table aids in selecting the hyperparameters for the function heterogeneity_param_prior when considering an informative prior distribution for the between-study variance parameter based on the two publications mentioned above (relevant for the function run_model to conduct random-effects network meta-analysis).

References

Rhodes KM, Turner RM, Higgins JP. Predictive distributions were developed for the extent of heterogeneity in meta-analyses of continuous outcome data. J Clin Epidemiol 2015;68(1):52–60. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2014.08.012

Turner RM, Jackson D, Wei Y, Thompson SG, Higgins JP. Predictive distributions for between-study heterogeneity and simple methods for their application in Bayesian meta-analysis. Stat Med 2015;34(6):984–98. doi: 10.1002/sim.6381

Author

Loukia M. Spineli