Performance of model‐based network meta‐analysis (MBNMA) of time‐course relationships: A simulation study
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Time-course model-based network meta-analysis (MBNMA) has been proposed as a framework to combine treatment comparisons from a network of randomized controlled trials reporting outcomes at multiple time-points. This can explain heterogeneity/inconsistency that arises by pooling studies with different follow-up times and allow inclusion of studies from earlier in drug development. The aim of this study is to explore using simulation: (a) how MBNMA model parameters are affected by the quantity/location of observed time-points across studies/comparisons, (b) how reliably an appropriate MBNMA model can be identified, (c) the robustness of model estimates and predictions under different dataset characteristics. Our results indicate that model parameters for a given treatment comparison are estimated with low mean bias even when no direct evidence was available, provided there was sufficient indirect evidence to estimate the time-course. A staged model selection strategy that selects time-course function, then heterogeneity, then covariance structure, identified the true model most reliably and efficiently. Predictions and parameter estimates from selected models had low mean bias even in the presence of high heterogeneity/correlation between time-points. However, failure to properly account for heterogeneity/correlation could lead to high error in precision of the estimates. Time-course MBNMA provides a statistically robust framework for synthesizing direct and indirect evidence to estimate relative effects and predicted mean responses whilst accounting for time-course and incorporating correlation and heterogeneity. This supports the use of MBNMA in evidence synthesis, particularly when additional studies are available with follow-up times that would otherwise prohibit their inclusion by conventional meta-analysis.
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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 | 0.491 | 0.189 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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 it