Meta-Subgroup Analysis

Authors

[Editor] Hu Zheng;

[Contributors]

Modified

2026-01-17

Note

Hiplot website

This page is the tutorial for source code version of the Hiplot Meta-Subgroup Analysis plugin. You can also use the Hiplot website to achieve no code ploting. For more information please see the following link:

https://hiplot.cn/basic/metawho?lang=en

The goal of metawho is to provide simple R implementation of “Meta-analytical method to Identify Who Benefits Most from Treatments”.

metawho is powered by R package metafor and does not support dataset contains individuals for now. Please use stata package ipdmetan if you are more familar with stata code.

Setup

System Requirements: Cross-platform (Linux/MacOS/Windows)
Programming language: R
Dependent packages: data.table; jsonlite; meta; cowplot

# Install packages
if (!requireNamespace("data.table", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("data.table")
}
if (!requireNamespace("jsonlite", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("jsonlite")
}
if (!requireNamespace("metawho", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("metawho")
}
if (!requireNamespace("cowplot", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("cowplot")
}

# Load packages
library(data.table)
library(jsonlite)
library(metawho)
library(cowplot)

sessioninfo::session_info("attached")

─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31)
 os       Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS
 system   x86_64, linux-gnu
 ui       X11
 language (EN)
 collate  C.UTF-8
 ctype    C.UTF-8
 tz       UTC
 date     2026-01-17
 pandoc   3.1.3 @ /usr/bin/ (via rmarkdown)
 quarto   1.8.27 @ /usr/local/bin/quarto

─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package    * version    date (UTC) lib source
 cowplot    * 1.2.0      2025-07-07 [1] RSPM
 data.table * 1.18.0     2025-12-24 [1] RSPM
 jsonlite   * 2.0.0      2025-03-27 [1] RSPM
 Matrix     * 1.7-4      2025-08-28 [3] CRAN (R 4.5.2)
 metadat    * 1.4-0      2025-02-04 [1] RSPM
 metafor    * 4.8-0      2025-01-28 [1] RSPM
 metawho    * 0.2.0      2019-12-06 [1] RSPM
 numDeriv   * 2016.8-1.1 2019-06-06 [1] RSPM

 [1] /home/runner/work/_temp/Library
 [2] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/site-library
 [3] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/library
 * ── Packages attached to the search path.

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Data Preparation

# Load data
data <- data.table::fread(jsonlite::read_json("https://hiplot.cn/ui/basic/metawho/data.json")$exampleData$textarea[[1]])
data <- as.data.frame(data)

# Convert data structure
data = deft_prepare(data, conf_level = 1 - 0.95)
res = deft_do(data, group_level = unique(data$subgroup))

# View data
head(data)

                 entry         trial subgroup   hr ci.lb ci.ub  ni   conf_q
1      Rizvi 2015-Male    Rizvi 2015     Male 0.30  0.09  1.00  16 1.959964
2    Rizvi 2015-Female    Rizvi 2015   Female 0.11  0.02  0.56  18 1.959964
3      Rizvi 2018-Male    Rizvi 2018     Male 1.25  0.82  1.90 118 1.959964
4    Rizvi 2018-Female    Rizvi 2018   Female 0.63  0.42  0.95 122 1.959964
5   Hellmann 2018-Male Hellmann 2018     Male 0.90  0.41  1.99  37 1.959964
6 Hellmann 2018-Female Hellmann 2018   Female 0.28  0.12  0.67  38 1.959964
          yi       sei
1 -1.2039728 0.6142831
2 -2.2072749 0.8500678
3  0.2231436 0.2143674
4 -0.4620355 0.2082200
5 -0.1053605 0.4030005
6 -1.2729657 0.4387290

Visualization

# Meta-Subgroup Analysis
p1 <- deft_show(res, element = "all")
p2 <- deft_show(res, element = "subgroup")
p <- plot_grid(p1, p2, nrow = 2)

p