Generalized Fused Lasso for Treatment Pooling in Network Meta‐Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This work develops a generalized fused lasso (GFL) approach to fitting contrast‐based network meta‐analysis (NMA) models. The GFL method penalizes all pairwise differences between treatment effects, resulting in the pooling of treatments that are not sufficiently different. This approach offers an intriguing avenue for potentially mitigating biases in treatment rankings and reducing sparsity in networks. To fit contrast‐based NMA models within the GFL framework, we formulate the models as generalized least squares problems, where the precision matrix depends on the standard error in the data, the estimated between‐study heterogeneity and the correlation between contrasts in multi‐arm studies. By utilizing a Cholesky decomposition of the precision matrix, we linearly transform the data vector and design matrix to frame NMA within the GFL framework. We demonstrate how to construct the GFL penalty such that every pairwise difference is penalized similarly. The model is straightforward to implement in R via the “genlasso” package, and runs instantaneously, contrary to other regularization approaches that are Bayesian. A two‐step GFL‐NMA approach is recommended to obtain measures of uncertainty associated with the (pooled) relative treatment effects. Two simulation studies confirm the GFL approach's ability to pool treatments that have the same (or similar) effects while also revealing when incorrect pooling may occur, and its potential benefits against alternative methods. The novel GFL‐NMA method is successfully applied to a real‐world dataset on diabetes where the standard NMA model was not favored compared to the best‐fitting GFL‐NMA model with AICc selection of the tuning parameter (.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.044 | 0.065 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".