Funding informationSchweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung, Grant/Award Number: 175933This article has earned an open data badge "Reproducible Research" for making publicly available the code necessary to reproduce the reported results. The results reported in this article could fully be reproduced.

The popular Bayesian meta-analysis expressed by Bayesian normal-normal hierarchical model (NNHM) synthesizes knowledge from several studies and is highly relevant in practice. Moreover, NNHM is the simplest Bayesian hierarchical model (BHM), which illustrates problems typical in more complex BHMs. Until now, it has been unclear to what extent the data determines the marginal posterior distributions of the parameters in NNHM. To address this issue we computed the second derivative of the Bhattacharyya coefficient with respect to the weighted likelihood, defined the total empirical determinacy (TED), the proportion of the empirical determinacy of location to TED (pEDL), and the proportion of the empirical determinacy of spread to TED (pEDS). We implemented this method in the R package ed4bhm and considered two case studies and one simulation study. We quantified TED, pEDL and pEDS under different modeling conditions such as model parametrization, the primary outcome, and the prior. This clarified to what extent the location and spread of the marginal posterior distributions of the parameters are determined by the data. Although these investigations focused on Bayesian NNHM, the method proposed is applicable more generally to complex BHMs.

The popular Bayesian meta-analysis expressed by the normal-normal hierarchical model synthesizes knowledge from several studies and is highly relevant in practice. The normal-normal hierarchical model is the simplest Bayesian hierarchical model, but illustrates problems typical in more complex Bayesian hierarchical models. Until now, it has been unclear to what extent the data determines the marginal posterior distributions of the parameters in the normal-normal hierarchical model. To address this issue we computed the second derivative of the Bhattacharyya coefficient with respect to the weighted likelihood. This quantity, which we define as the total empirical determinacy (TED), can be written as the sum of two terms: the empirical determinacy of location (EDL), and the empirical determinacy of spread (EDS). We implemented this method in the R package ed4bhm and considered two case studies and one simulation study. We quantified TED, EDL and EDS under different modeling conditions such as model parametrization, the primary outcome, and the prior. This clarifies to what extent the location and spread of the marginal posterior distributions of the parameters are determined by the data. Although these investigations focused on Bayesian normal-normal hierarchical model, the method proposed is applicable more generally to complex Bayesian hierarchical models.

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