Estimation of within-study covariances in multivariate meta-analysis

03/11/2020

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by   Xiaohuan Xue, et al.

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Multivariate meta-analysis can be adapted to a wide range of situations for multiple outcomes and multiple treatment groups when combining studies together. The within-study correlation between effect sizes is often assumed known in multivariate meta-analysis while it is not always known practically. In this paper, we propose a generic method to approximate the within-study covariance for effect sizes in multivariate meta-analysis and apply this method to the scenarios with multiple outcomes and one outcome with multiple treatment groups respectively.