Precision of Treatment Hierarchy: A Metric for Quantifying Certainty in Treatment Hierarchies from Network Meta-Analysis
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866915757924810752 |
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| author | Wigle, Augustine Béliveau, Audrey Salanti, Georgia Rücker, Gerta Schwarzer, Guido Mavridis, Dimitris Nikolakopoulou, Adriani |
| author_facet | Wigle, Augustine Béliveau, Audrey Salanti, Georgia Rücker, Gerta Schwarzer, Guido Mavridis, Dimitris Nikolakopoulou, Adriani |
| contents | Network meta-analysis (NMA) is an extension of pairwise meta-analysis which facilitates the estimation of relative effects for multiple competing treatments. A hierarchy of treatments is a useful output of an NMA. Treatment hierarchies are produced using ranking metrics. Common ranking metrics include the Surface Under the Cumulative RAnking curve (SUCRA) and P-scores, which are the frequentist analogue to SUCRAs. Both metrics consider the size and uncertainty of the estimated treatment effects, with larger values indicating a more preferred treatment. Although SUCRAs and P-scores themselves consider uncertainty, treatment hierarchies produced by these ranking metrics are typically reported without a measure of certainty, which might be misleading to practitioners. We propose a new metric, Precision of Treatment Hierarchy (POTH), which quantifies the certainty in producing a treatment hierarchy from SUCRAs or P-scores. The metric connects three statistical quantities: The variance of the SUCRA values, the variance of the mean rank of each treatment, and the average variance of the distribution of individual ranks for each treatment. POTH provides a single, interpretable value which quantifies the degree of certainty in producing a treatment hierarchy. We show how the metric can be adapted to apply to subsets of treatments in a network, for example, to quantify the certainty in the hierarchy of the top three treatments. We calculate POTH for a database of NMAs to investigate its empirical properties, and we demonstrate its use on three published networks. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_11596 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Precision of Treatment Hierarchy: A Metric for Quantifying Certainty in Treatment Hierarchies from Network Meta-Analysis Wigle, Augustine Béliveau, Audrey Salanti, Georgia Rücker, Gerta Schwarzer, Guido Mavridis, Dimitris Nikolakopoulou, Adriani Methodology Network meta-analysis (NMA) is an extension of pairwise meta-analysis which facilitates the estimation of relative effects for multiple competing treatments. A hierarchy of treatments is a useful output of an NMA. Treatment hierarchies are produced using ranking metrics. Common ranking metrics include the Surface Under the Cumulative RAnking curve (SUCRA) and P-scores, which are the frequentist analogue to SUCRAs. Both metrics consider the size and uncertainty of the estimated treatment effects, with larger values indicating a more preferred treatment. Although SUCRAs and P-scores themselves consider uncertainty, treatment hierarchies produced by these ranking metrics are typically reported without a measure of certainty, which might be misleading to practitioners. We propose a new metric, Precision of Treatment Hierarchy (POTH), which quantifies the certainty in producing a treatment hierarchy from SUCRAs or P-scores. The metric connects three statistical quantities: The variance of the SUCRA values, the variance of the mean rank of each treatment, and the average variance of the distribution of individual ranks for each treatment. POTH provides a single, interpretable value which quantifies the degree of certainty in producing a treatment hierarchy. We show how the metric can be adapted to apply to subsets of treatments in a network, for example, to quantify the certainty in the hierarchy of the top three treatments. We calculate POTH for a database of NMAs to investigate its empirical properties, and we demonstrate its use on three published networks. |
| title | Precision of Treatment Hierarchy: A Metric for Quantifying Certainty in Treatment Hierarchies from Network Meta-Analysis |
| topic | Methodology |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11596 |