Meta-analysis of Bayesian analyses

Understand

Meta-analysis aims to generalize results from multiple related statistical analyses through a combined analysis.

• While the natural outcome of a Bayesian study is a posterior distribution, traditional Bayesian meta-analyses proceed by combining summary statistics (i.e., point-valued estimates) computed from data.
• In this paper, we develop a framework for combining posterior distributions from multiple related Bayesian studies into a meta-analysis.
• Importantly, the method is capable of reusing pre-computed posteriors from computationally costly analyses, without needing the implementation details from each study.