Poor man's metaregression with lmer ?
On Fri, 22 May 2009, Emmanuel Charpentier wrote:
One obvious solution is mima : transform each failure rate f in logit (log(f/(1-f)) with estimated variance 1/(n*f+0.5)+1/(n*(1-f)+0.5). With a hiccup : three of the series have no failure or no success (yes, both can happen ...), which gives an infinite log(OR). Ouch ! Excluding them is not acceptable, and adding 0.5 to all counts (aka "continuity correction") will anyway be judged passe by the panel ...
You just have to explain that you are using maximum penalized likelihood, with the Jeffreys invariant prior as penalty function ;). See the brlr and logistf packages and refs. If you did have time to failure, there is also a coxphf. We usually present results from both the fixed and random effects metaanalysis -- your lmer code looks OK to me. David Duffy.