# Overview of Examples

This package contains a number of vignettes, each one walking through an example analysis. The table below gives an overview.

Many of these examples recreate analyses from the series of Technical Support Documents published by the NICE Decision Support Unit (Dias et al. 2011). The exceptions are atrial fibrillation (Cooper et al. 2009), white blood cell transfusion (Turner et al. 2012), and plaque psoriasis multilevel network meta-regression (Phillippo et al. 2020).

Title | Outcome type | Likelihood | Link function | Notable features
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Blocker | Counts | Binomial | logit | Pairwise MA
Dietary fat | Rates | Poisson | log | Analysis of log rate ratios from rate data
Diabetes | Counts with time at risk | Binomial | cloglog | Analysis of log hazard ratios from count data with time at risk
Parkinson’s | Continuous | Normal | Identity | Analysis of arm-based data, contrast-based data, and a mixture of both
HTA plaque psoriasis | Ordered | Multinomial (ordered) | probit | Analysis of ordered categorical outcomes
Statins | Counts | Binomial | logit | Meta-regression with subgroups
BCG vaccine | Counts | Binomial | logit | Meta-regression with a continuous covariate, predictive distributions
Smoking cessation | Counts | Binomial | logit | Assessing inconsistency with unrelated mean effects and node-splitting models
Thrombolytics | Counts | Binomial | logit | Assessing inconsistency with unrelated mean effects and node-splitting models
Atrial fibrillation | Counts | Binomial | logit | Meta-regression with shared class interactions
WBC transfusion | Counts | Binomial | logit | Informative log-Normal prior on \(\tau^2\)
ML-NMR plaque psoriasis | Binary (IPD) and counts (AgD) | Bernoulli (IPD) and two-parameter Binomial (AgD) | probit | Multilevel network meta-regression combining IPD and AgD

## References

Cooper, N. J., A. J. Sutton, D. Morris, A. E. Ades, and N. J. Welton. 2009. “Addressing Between-Study Heterogeneity and Inconsistency in Mixed Treatment Comparisons: Application to Stroke Prevention Treatments in Individuals with Non-Rheumatic Atrial Fibrillation.” Statistics in Medicine 28 (14): 1861–81. https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.3594.
Dias, S., N. J. Welton, A. J. Sutton, D. M. Caldwell, G. Lu, S. Reken, and A. E. Ades. 2011. “NICE DSU Technical Support Documents 1-7: Evidence Synthesis for Decision Making.” National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. https://nicedsu.sites.sheffield.ac.uk.
Phillippo, D. M., S. Dias, A. E. Ades, M. Belger, A. Brnabic, A. Schacht, D. Saure, Z. Kadziola, and N. J. Welton. 2020. “Multilevel Network Meta-Regression for Population-Adjusted Treatment Comparisons.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 183 (3): 1189–1210. https://doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12579.
Turner, R. M., J. Davey, M. J. Clarke, S. G. Thompson, and J. P. T. Higgins. 2012. “Predicting the Extent of Heterogeneity in Meta-Analysis, Using Empirical Data from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.” International Journal of Epidemiology 41 (3): 818–27. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dys041.