The R Package metaLik for Likelihood Inference in Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Meta-analysis is a statistical method for combining information from different studies about the same issue of interest. Meta-analysis is widely diffuse in medical investigation and more recently it received a growing interest also in social disciplines. Typical applications involve a small number of studies, thus making ordinary inferential methods based on first-order asymptotics unreliable. More accurate results can be obtained by exploiting the theory of higher-order asymptotics. This paper describes the metaLik package which provides an R implementation of higher-order likelihood methods in meta-analysis. The extension to meta-regression is included. Two real data examples are used to illustrate the capabilities of the package.

Keywords

• higher-order asymptotics
• likelihood
• linear mixed-effects model
• meta-analysis
• R