Incorporating external evidence on between-trial heterogeneity in network meta-analysis.

ABSTRACT: In a network meta-analysis, between-study heterogeneity variances are often very imprecisely estimated because data are sparse, so standard errors of treatment differences can be highly unstable. External evidence can provide informative prior distributions for heterogeneity and, hence, improve inferences. We explore approaches for specifying informative priors for multiple heterogeneity variances in a network meta-analysis. First, we assume equal heterogeneity variances across all pairwise intervention comparisons (approach 1); incorporating an informative prior for the common variance is then straightforward. Models allowing unequal heterogeneity variances are more realistic; however, care must be taken to ensure implied variance-covariance matrices remain valid. We consider three strate

SUBMITTER: Turner RM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6492109 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature