Event

Many health research questions concern the multiple pathways that are presumed to mediate a relationship between an exposure and an outcome. Very often, the translational intent of such research questions is to inform potential intervention targets. However, the usual causal mediation approaches do not consider this interventional intent and/or rely on assumptions that are either too stringent or not assessable in practice. Recently an alternative approach has emerged based on “interventional effects” that assess the impact of relevant interventions on one or multiple mediators and are identifiable under relaxed assumptions. This approach is gaining popularity in applications, making it timely to present this topic.

This course provides an overview of the conceptual issues surrounding causal mediation analysis. It then presents the interventional effects approach, using a recently proposed framework that defines these effects by mapping them to a “target trial” that evaluates interventions on one or several mediators. We describe how to define and emulate a target trial for mediation analysis and introduce an extended g-computation approach for estimating these effects.

Lectures and tutorials will ground understanding of the methods, whilst a hands-on computer practical (in R and Stata) will cover their practical implementation. Illustrations from real-world epidemiological studies are included throughout.

Prerequisites:  It is strongly recommended that participants have previously taken an introductory course on causal inference, such as a prior ViCBiostat causal inference workshop, and have familiarity with concepts and methods such as the target trial and g-computation. To do the computer practical, students must also have a sound working familiarity with Stata or R and have the corresponding software installed on their computer or laptop. A list of R packages required will be circulated with electronic copies of the course material beforehand.

This event will be held in person and online via Zoom. 

Registration is now open via: https://shop.monash.edu/vicbiostat-2024-summer-school.html

Registration prices