Introduction Systematic reviews and meta-analyses provide an objective and reliable way of summarising trial results, and can inform both clinical practice and the design, conduct and reporting of trials. However, those based on aggregate data are sometimes limited by the availability of such data, while those based on more comprehensive individual participant data (IPD) can provide more detail...

OBJECTIVE To establish the extent to which systematic reviews and meta-analyses of individual participant data (IPD) are being used to inform the recommendations included in published clinical guidelines. DESIGN Descriptive study. SETTING Database maintained by the Cochrane IPD Meta-analysis Methods Group, supplemented by records of published IPD meta-analyses held in a separate database. ...

OBJECTIVE To illustrate the utility of statistical monitoring boundaries in meta-analysis, and provide a framework in which meta-analysis can be interpreted according to the adequacy of sample size. To propose a simple method for determining how many patients need to be randomized in a future trial before a meta-analysis can be deemed conclusive. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING Prospective meta-anal...

Meta reinforcement learning (RL) attempts to discover new RL algorithms automatically from environment interaction. In so-called black-box approaches, the policy and algorithm are jointly represented by a single neural network. These methods very flexible, but they tend underperform compared human-engineered in terms of generalisation new, unseen environments. this paper, we explore role symmet...

CONTEXT Overlapping meta-analyses on the same topic are common and often report discordant results. An Endocrine Society (ES) meta-analysis reported that vitamin D with calcium reduced the risk of falls, whereas vitamin D monotherapy had no effect. Despite meta-analyzing an overlapping set of trials, we concluded that vitamin D with or without calcium had no effect on falls. OBJECTIVE The obj...

The use of meta-analysis in medicine is widespread nowadays, particularly in the field of interventional cardiology. Meta-analysis is a statistical approach aiming to combine date from a large number of patients from randomized clinical studies and/or non-randomized registries so as to obtain a pooled estimate of the results and to answer specific research questions. It is important to take the...

Multi-objective quadratic assignment problems (mQAPs) are NP-hard problems that optimally allocate facilities to locations using a distance matrix and several flow matrices. mQAPs are often used to compare the performance of the multi-objective meta-heuristics. We generate large mQAP instances by combining small size mQAP with known local optimum. We call these instances composite mQAPs, and we...

In the present study, multi-objective optimization of 4-digit NACA airfoils is performed at three steps. At the first step, lift (CL) and drag (CD) coefficient in a set of 4-digit NACA airfoils are numerically investigated using commercial software NUMECA. Two meta-models based on the evolved Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) type neural networks are obtained, at the second step, for modelin...