Table 4.

Sensitivity analyses for oesophageal cancer survival among males

	Prior 1	Prior 2	Prior 3	Prior 4	Prior 5	Prior 6
Distribution of RER
Mean	100.2	100.7	100.4	100.1	100.4	100.0
Standard deviation	6.5	11.5	8.2	3.8	9.3	0.3
Maximum	119.6	140.7	127.6	111.3	129.5	102.1
75% Quartile	105.3	105.0	105.7	102.6	106.3	100.2
Median	98.0	97.3	97.7	99.2	97.0	100.0
25% Quartile	95.2	92.6	94.7	97.2	93.7	99.8
Minimum	80.9	63.4	75.0	89.4	72.5	98.3
90% ratio1	1.2	1.4	1.3	1.1	1.3	1.0
pD2	23.988	36.021	33.105	18.663	30.524	18.218
DIC3	3690.23	3690.27	3691.24	3691.32	3690.07	3694.96
Spatial fraction4	0.62	0.87	0.51	0.48	0.80	0.00
Percent SLAs with Geweke <0.01 for RER	89.3%	9.8%	10.5%	19.5%	21.5%	63.0%

Notes:

1. The 90% ratio is calculated as the 95^th percentile divided by the 5^th percentile of the smoothed RER estimates.

2. pD represents the effective number of parameters in the model. Larger values indicate less smoothing of estimates.

3. DIC = Deviance Information Criterion. Smaller values (of at least 5 below) indicate a better model fit.

4. The spatial fraction estimates the relative contribution of spatial and unstructured heterogeneity, and is calculated as: $\text{Spatial}\text{fraction}=\frac{{\theta }_{marginal}^2}{{\theta }_{marginal}^2+{\sigma }^2}$

Where ${\theta }_{marginal}^2$ = marginal spatial variance, σ ²= marginal variability of the unstructured random effects between areas. A value close to 1 indicates the spatial heterogeneity dominates, whereas a value close to 0 indicates the unstructured heterogeneity dominates.