Institute of Medical Biometry and Statistics, Faculty of Medicine and Medical Center - University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
Present Address: Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
Res Synth Methods. 2021 Jan;12(1):13-19. doi: 10.1002/jrsm.1410. Epub 2020 Apr 30.
In the era of the "reproducibility crisis" and the "P-value controversy" new ways of presentation and interpretation of the results of a meta-analysis are desirable. One suggestion that has been made for single studies almost six decades ago and taken up now and then is the P-value function. For a given outcome, this function assigns a P-value to each possible hypothetical value, given the data. Moreover, the P-value function simultaneously provides two-sided confidence intervals for all possible alpha levels. An application to meta-analysis, while suggested early, has not been widely established. We introduce the drapery plot that presents the P-value function for all individual studies and pooled estimates in a meta-analysis as curves and the prediction range for a single future study. We also present a scaled variant with the test statistic on the y-axis. Both plots visualize the full information of a pairwise meta-analysis. We see a drapery plot as a complementary figure to a forest plot. It may be even an alternative in meta-analyses with many studies where forest plots tend to become very large and complex.
在“可重复性危机”和“P 值争议”的时代，人们希望有一种新的方法来呈现和解释荟萃分析的结果。大约六十年前，有人提出了一种针对单一研究的建议，即 P 值函数，此后也不时有人提出。对于给定的结果，该函数根据数据为每个可能的假设值分配一个 P 值。此外，P 值函数同时为所有可能的α水平提供了双侧置信区间。尽管早期曾有人建议将其应用于荟萃分析，但并未得到广泛应用。我们引入了帷幕图，将荟萃分析中所有个体研究和汇总估计的 P 值函数作为曲线呈现，并为单个未来研究提供预测范围。我们还提出了一个带有 y 轴上检验统计量的缩放变体。这两个图都可视化了成对荟萃分析的全部信息。我们认为帷幕图是森林图的补充图。在荟萃分析中，当森林图变得非常大和复杂时，帷幕图甚至可以作为替代图。
