metagen {meta}R Documentation

Generic inverse variance meta-analysis

Description

Fixed and random effects meta-analysis based on estimates and their standard errors; inverse variance weighting is used for pooling.

Usage

metagen(TE, seTE, studlab, data=NULL, subset=NULL, sm="",
        level = 0.95, level.comb = level)

Arguments

TE Estimate of treatment effect.
seTE Standard error of treatment estimate.
studlab An optional vector with study labels.
data An optional data frame containing the study information.
subset An optional vector specifying a subset of studies to be used.
sm A character string indicating underlying summary measure, e.g., "RD", "RR", "OR", "AS", "MD", "SMD".
level The level used to calculate confidence intervals for individual studies.
level.comb The level used to calculate confidence intervals for pooled estimates.

Details

Generic method for meta-analysis, only treatment estimates and their standard error are needed. The method is useful, e.g., for pooling of log hazard ratios. The inverse variance method is used for pooling. Random effects estimate is based on the DerSimonian-Laird method.

Value

An object of class c("metagen", "meta") with corresponding print, summary, plot function. The object is a list containing the following components:

TE, seTE, studlab, As defined above.
sm
w.fixed, w.random Weight of individual studies (in fixed and random effects model).
TE.fixed, seTE.fixed Estimated overall treatment effect and standard error (fixed effect model).
TE.random, seTE.random Estimated overall treatment effect and standard error (random effects model).
k Number of studies combined in meta-analysis.
Q Heterogeneity statistic.
tau Square-root of between-study variance (moment estimator of DerSimonian-Laird).
method Pooling method: "Inverse".
level The level used to calculate confidence intervals for individual studies.
level.comb The level used to calculate confidence intervals for pooled estimates.
call Function call.

Author(s)

Guido Schwarzer sc@imbi.uni-freiburg.de

References

Cooper H & Hedges LV (1994), The Handbook of Research Synthesis. Newbury Park, CA: Russell Sage Foundation.

See Also

metabin, metacont, print.meta

Examples

data(Fleiss93)
meta1 <- metabin(event.e, n.e, event.c, n.c, data=Fleiss93, sm="RR", meth="I")
meta1

##
## Identical results by using the following commands:
##
meta1
metagen(meta1$TE, meta1$seTE, sm="RR")

[Package meta version 0.9-18 Index]