The main analysis, which included a random study center intercept to adjust for the clustering within city, focused on predicted outdoor NO2 exposure at the home address es) only, while we assessed time spent away from home, daycare attendance, and infiltration in sensitivity analyses.
The main analysis engine in NetWalker is NetWalk, a random walk-based scoring algorithm of network components based on the assessment of the whole data distribution without requiring any data cutoffs.
We, therefore, will perform a second sensitivity analyses to explore the effect of departures (varied over a plausible range) from the assumption of missing at random made in the main analysis as recommended by White et al [ 68].
Since the variation in the 'non-elective' births is most obviously random, we exclude in the main analysis 'elective' births (resulting from induction of labour and elective caesarean sections).
For the main analysis without air pollution data, a hierarchical structure (random intercept) was specified to model possible differences between countries in the prevalence of 'heart disease and stroke' using multilevel logistic regression; a LRT to find the best-fitting model showed that including a random slope for country was not necessary.
The main analysis assumes that, conditional on the model covariates, outcome data are missing at random.
14 We used the random effects model described by Der-Simonian and Laird for the main analysis.
However, the data set is small and random fluctuation might therefore explain that this estimate is lower than that for the main analysis.
Point estimates of treatment effects were similar to those derived for the main analysis for all outcomes and interventions, and overlapping 95% credibility intervals indicated that estimates from all sensitivity analyses, including conventional random effects meta-analyses of pairwise comparisons, were compatible with the main analysis.
Short summaries and analysis of important news stories, outside our main analysis.
