appraise: Bias-Aware Evidence Synthesis in Systematic Reviews

Implements a bias-aware framework for evidence synthesis in systematic reviews and health technology assessments, as described in Kabali (2025) <doi:10.1111/jep.70272>. The package models study-level effect estimates by explicitly accounting for multiple sources of bias through prior distributions and propagates uncertainty using posterior simulation. Evidence across studies is combined using posterior mixture distributions rather than a single pooled likelihood, enabling probabilistic inference on clinically or policy-relevant thresholds. The methods are designed to support transparent decision-making when study relevance and bias vary across the evidence base.

Version: 0.1.1
Imports: stats
Suggests: sn, VGAM, cmdstanr, rmarkdown, knitr
Published: 2026-02-09
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.appraise (may not be active yet)
Author: Conrad Kabali [aut, cre]
Maintainer: Conrad Kabali <conrad.kabali at utoronto.ca>
License: GPL-3
NeedsCompilation: no
Additional_repositories: https://stan-dev.r-universe.dev/
Materials: README
CRAN checks: appraise results

Documentation:

Reference manual: appraise.html , appraise.pdf
Vignettes: Introduction to the appraise Package (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: appraise_0.1.1.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): appraise_0.1.1.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): appraise_0.1.1.tgz, r-release (x86_64): not available, r-oldrel (x86_64): not available

Linking:

Please use the canonical form https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=appraise to link to this page.