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Activity Number: 566
Type: Other
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: ASA
Abstract - #307350
Title: Mediation and Confounding
Author(s): Tyler J VanderWeele*+
Companies: Harvard School of Public Health
Keywords: Causal inference ; Confounding ; Direct and indirect effects ; Mediation ; Sensitivity Analysis
Abstract:

This introductory overview lecture will cover some of the recent developments in causal mediation analysis and provide practical tools to implement these techniques. Mediation analysis concerns assessing the mechanisms and pathways by which causal effects operate. The lecture will cover the relationship between traditional methods for mediation in epidemiology and the social sciences and those that have been developing within the causal inference literature using natural direct and indirect effects. Methods for dichotomous, continuous, and time-to-event outcomes will be described. Special attention will be given to the strong assumptions about confounding that must be made to identify direct and indirect effects. The use and implementation of sensitivity analysis techniques to assess the how sensitive conclusions are to violations of confounding assumptions will be covered. Discussion will be given to how such mediation analysis approaches can be extended to settings in which data come from a case-control study design. The methods will be illustrated by various applications to perinatal, genetic and social epidemiology.


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