[R-sig-ME] Poor man's metaregression with lmer ?

[David Duffy]

On Fri, 22 May 2009, Emmanuel Charpentier wrote:

> One obvious solution is mima : transform each failure rate f in logit
> (log(f/(1-f)) with estimated variance 1/(n*f+0.5)+1/(n*(1-f)+0.5). With
> a hiccup : three of the series have no failure or no success (yes, both
> can happen ...), which gives an infinite log(OR). Ouch ! Excluding them
> is not acceptable, and adding 0.5 to all counts (aka "continuity
> correction") will anyway be judged passe by the panel ...

You just have to explain that you are using maximum penalized likelihood, 
with the Jeffreys invariant prior as penalty function ;).  See the brlr 
and logistf packages and refs.  If you did have time to failure, there 
is also a coxphf.  We usually present results from both the fixed 
and random effects metaanalysis -- your lmer code looks OK to me.

David Duffy.