FEmrt function

Fixed effect meta-tree

A function to fit fixed effect meta-trees to meta-analytic data. The model is assuming a fixed effect within subgroups and between subgroups. The tree growing process is equivalent to the approach described in Li et al. (2017) using fixed effect weights in the function rpart() developed by Therneau, Atkinson & Ripley (2014).

FEmrt(
  formula,
  data,
  vi,
  subset,
  c = 1,
  control = rpart.control(xval = 10, minbucket = 3, minsplit = 6, cp = 1e-04),
  ...
)

Arguments

• formula: A formula, with an outcome variable (usually the effect size) and the potential moderator variables but no interaction terms.
• data: A data frame of a meta-analytic data set, including the study effect sizes, sampling variance, and the potential moderators.
• vi: sampling variance of the effect size.
• subset: optional expression that selects only a subset of the rows of the data.
• c: A non-negative scalar.The pruning parameter to prune the initial tree by the "c*standard-error" rule.
• control: the control object (similar to rpart.control from the rpart package) that is used in the tree algorithm
• ...: Additional arguments passed to the tree growing algorithm based on rpart.

Returns

If (a) moderator effect(s) is(are) detected, the function will return a‘FEmrt’ object including the following components:

tree: The pruned tree that represents the moderator effect(s) and interaction effect(s) between them.

n: The number of the studies in each subgroup

Qb: The between-subgroups Q-statistic

df: The degree of freedoms of the between-subgroups Q test

pval.Qb: The p-value of the between-subgroups Q test

Qw: The within-subgroup Q-statistic in each subgroup

g: The subgroup summary effect size, based on Hedges'g

se: The standard error of the subgroup summary effect size

zval: The test statistic of the subgroup summary effect size

pval: The p-value for the test statistics of the subgroup summary effect size

ci.lb: The lower bound of the confidence interval

ci.ub: The upper bound of the confidence interval

call: The matched call

If no moderator effect is detected, the function will return a ‘FEmrt’object including the following components:

n: The total number of the studies

Q: The Q-statistic of the heterogeneity test

df: The degrees of freedom of the heterogeneity test

pval.Q: The p-value of the heterogeneity test

g: The summary effect size for all studies

se: The standard error of the summary effect size

zval: The test statistic of the summary effect size

pval: The p-value of the test statistic of the summary effect size

ci.lb: The lower bound of the confidence interval for the summary effect size

ci.ub: The upper bound of the confidence interval for the summary effect size

call: The matched call

Examples

data(dat.BCT2009)
library(Rcpp)
FEtree <- FEmrt(g ~ T1 + T2+ T4 + T25, vi = vi, data = dat.BCT2009, c = 0)
print(FEtree)
summary(FEtree)
plot(FEtree)

References

Dusseldorp, E., van Genugten, L., van Buuren, S., Verheijden, M. W., & van Empelen, P. (2014). Combinations of techniques that effectively change health behavior: Evidence from meta-cart analysis. Health Psychology, 33(12), 1530-1540. doi: 10.1037/hea0000018.

Li, X., Dusseldorp, E., & Meulman, J. J. (2017). Meta-CART: A tool to identify interactions between moderators in meta-analysis. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, 70(1), 118-136. doi: 10.1111/bmsp.12088.

Therneau, T., Atkinson, B., & Ripley, B. (2014) rpart: Recursive partitioning and regression trees. R package version, 4-1.

See Also

summary.FEmrt, plot.FEmrt, rpart,rpart.control