I find myself irritated that they only include effect sizes and sample sizes rather than the actual observed counts for each group, as that would make a Bayesian analysis much easier.
I haven’t looked in detail at it, but is that because their formats or approaches do not support raw data or because they do support raw counts but simply did not supply them? ie they had the data & discarded it, or they may never have had the observed counts & were going off effect sizes reported in papers; the latter is plausible as I’ve found authors very unwilling to share detailed information beyond what is reported in papers.
Here are some details about the file formats: http://tech.cochrane.org/revman/documentation/file-formats
I find myself irritated that they only include effect sizes and sample sizes rather than the actual observed counts for each group, as that would make a Bayesian analysis much easier.
I haven’t looked in detail at it, but is that because their formats or approaches do not support raw data or because they do support raw counts but simply did not supply them? ie they had the data & discarded it, or they may never have had the observed counts & were going off effect sizes reported in papers; the latter is plausible as I’ve found authors very unwilling to share detailed information beyond what is reported in papers.
Turns out they actually, do report it! It was just under an unexpected label “EVENTS_1”. I’m going to do a meta analysis of my own.
Followup:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/25/beware-mass-produced-medical-recommendations/#comment-35322
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/jsalvatier/vitamind/blob/master/Vitamin%20D%20meta%20analysis.ipynb?create=1