A comparison of analytic approaches for individual patient data meta-analyses with binary outcomes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Individual patient data meta-analyses (IPD-MA) are often performed using a one-stage approach-- a form of generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) for binary outcomes. We compare (i) one-stage to two-stage approaches (ii) the performance of two estimation procedures (Penalized Quasi-likelihood-PQL and Adaptive Gaussian Hermite Quadrature-AGHQ) for GLMMs with binary outcomes within the one-stage approach and (iii) using stratified study-effect or random study-effects. We compare the different approaches via a simulation study, in terms of bias, mean-squared error (MSE), coverage and numerical convergence, of the pooled treatment effect (β 1) and between-study heterogeneity of the treatment effect (τ 1 2 ). We varied the prevalence of the outcome, sample size, number of studies and variances and correlation of the random effects. The two-stage and one-stage methods produced approximately unbiased β 1 estimates. PQL performed better than AGHQ for estimating τ 1 2 with respect to MSE, but performed comparably with AGHQ in estimating the bias of β 1 and of τ 1 2 . The random study-effects model outperformed the stratified study-effects model in small size MA. The one-stage approach is recommended over the two-stage method for small size MA. There was no meaningful difference between the PQL and AGHQ procedures. Though the random-intercept and stratified-intercept approaches can suffer from their underlining assumptions, fitting GLMM with a random-intercept are less prone to misfit and has good convergence rate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.624 | 0.843 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".