Positive estimation of the between-study variance in meta-analysis : theory and methods

Abstract

Positive estimators of the between-study variance are proposed. Explicit variance formulae for the estimators are given and approximate confidence intervals for the between-group variance are constructed, thus helping to partly solve a long outstanding and open problem. By Monte Carlo simulation, the bias and standard deviation of the proposed estimators are compared with a standard estimator in meta-analysis. Attained confidence coefficients of the constructed confidence intervals are also presented. To illustrate the application of the proposed procedures, three examples are given, the first is from agriculture, the other two are from clinical trials with normal and binary outcomes, respectively.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.