Combining information

The combination of information from diverse sources is a common task encountered in computational statistics. A popular label for analyses involving the combination of results from independent studies is meta-analysis. The goal of the methodology is to bring together the results of different studies, reanalyze the disparate results within the context of their common endpoints, synthesize where possible into a single summary endpoint, increase the sensitivity of the analysis to detect the presence of adverse effects, and provide a quantitative analysis of the phenomenon of interest based on the combined data. This article discusses some basic methods in meta-analytic calculations and includes commentary on how to combine or average results from multiple models applied to the same set of data.