Sensitivity Analysis for Unmeasured Confounding in Meta-Analyses

DOI10.1080/01621459.2018.1529598MaRDI QIDQ119531zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Maya B. Mathur, Maya B. Mathur, Tyler J. Vanderweele

Publication date 30 April 2019

Published in Journal of the American Statistical Association (Search for Journal in Brave)

Copyright license Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.09076

zbMATH Keywords

biasconfoundingmeta-analysisobservational studiessensitivity analysis

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Point estimation (62F10) Sensitivity, stability, parametric optimization (90C31)

Abstract: Random-effects meta-analyses of observational studies can produce biased estimates if the synthesized studies are subject to unmeasured confounding. We propose sensitivity analyses quantifying the extent to which unmeasured confounding of specified magnitude could reduce to below a certain threshold the proportion of true effect sizes that are scientifically meaningful. We also develop converse methods to estimate the strength of confounding capable of reducing the proportion of scientifically meaningful true effects to below a chosen threshold. These methods apply when a "bias factor" is assumed to be normally distributed across studies or is assessed across a range of fixed values. Our estimators are derived using recently proposed sharp bounds on confounding bias within a single study that do not make assumptions regarding the unmeasured confounders themselves or the functional form of their relationships to the exposure and outcome of interest. We provide an R package, ConfoundedMeta, and a freely available online graphical user interface that compute point estimates and inference and produce plots for conducting such sensitivity analyses. These methods facilitate principled use of random-effects meta-analyses of observational studies to assess the strength of causal evidence for a hypothesis.

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Cites work

• Assessing the Sensitivity of Regression Results to Unmeasured Confounders in Observational Studies
• Consensus Values and Weighting Factors
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 4090552 (Why is no real title available?)
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 2066109 (Why is no real title available?)
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Cited in

(11)

• A bias in the evaluation of bias comparing randomized trials with nonexperimental studies
• Regression analysis of unmeasured confounding
• Outcome-wide longitudinal designs for causal inference: a new template for empirical studies
• Evaluating costs with unmeasured confounding: a sensitivity analysis for the treatment effect
• Simplified Bayesian sensitivity analysis for mismeasured and unobserved confounders
• The Impact of Prior Distributions for Uncontrolled Confounding and Response Bias
• EValue
• Assessing the Sensitivity of Regression Results to Unmeasured Confounders in Observational Studies
• Making sense of sensitivity: extending omitted variable bias
• Sensitivity Analysis via the Proportion of Unmeasured Confounding
• A review of methods for research synthesis

Describes a project that uses

Uses Software

• R
• metafor
• PublicationBias

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