Causal Mediation Analysis for the Cox Proportional Hazards Model with a Smooth Baseline Hazard Estimator.

ABSTRACT: An important problem within the social, behavioral, and health sciences is how to partition an exposure effect (e.g. treatment or risk factor) among specific pathway effects and to quantify the importance of each pathway. Mediation analysis based on the potential outcomes framework is an important tool to address this problem and we consider the estimation of mediation effects for the proportional hazards model in this paper. We give precise definitions of the total effect, natural indirect effect, and natural direct effect in terms of the survival probability, hazard function, and restricted mean survival time within the standard two-stage mediation framework. To estimate the mediation effects on different scales, we propose a mediation formula approach in which simple parametric models (

SUBMITTER: Wang W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5604250 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature