Biostatistics Commons^™

Incorporating Historical Models With Adaptive Bayesian Updates, Philip S. Boonstra, Ryan P. Barbaro

The University of Michigan Department of Biostatistics Working Paper Series

This paper considers Bayesian approaches for incorporating information from a historical model into a current analysis when the historical model includes only a subset of covariates currently of interest. The statistical challenge is two-fold. First, the parameters in the nested historical model are not generally equal to their counterparts in the larger current model, neither in value nor interpretation. Second, because the historical information will not be equally informative for all parameters in the current analysis, additional regularization may be required beyond that provided by the historical information. We propose several novel extensions of the so-called power prior that adaptively …