Optimally estimating the sample standard deviation from the five‐number summary

When reporting the results of clinical studies, some researchers may choose the five-number summary (including the sample median, the first and third quartiles, and the minimum and maximum values) rather than the sample mean and standard deviation (SD), particularly for skewed data. For these studies, when included in a meta-analysis, it is often desired to convert the five-number summary back to the sample mean and SD. For this purpose, several methods have been proposed in the recent literature and they are increasingly used nowadays. In this article, we propose to further advance the literature by developing a smoothly weighted estimator for the sample SD that fully utilizes the sample size information. For…

• HK
  Hong Kong Baptist University
• NN
  National Natural Science Foundation of China

  Awards: 11671338, 11971265
• GR
  General Research Fund of Shanghai Normal University

  Award: HKBU12303918
• UN
  U.S. National Library of Medicine

  Award: R01LM012982