The Statistics in Epidemiology Section will offer a short course on causal mediation analysis taught by Tyler VanderWeele on August 5 from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. For registration and pricing, visit the JSM website.

The course will cover 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 course will cover the relationship between traditional methods for mediation in epidemiology and the social sciences and new methods in causal inference. For dichotomous, continuous, and time-to-event outcomes, discussion will be given as to when the standard approaches to mediation analysis are valid. Using ideas from causal inference and natural direct and indirect effects, alternative mediation analysis techniques will be described when the standard approaches will not work. The no-confounding assumptions needed for these techniques will be described. SAS, SPSS, and Stata macros to implement these techniques will be covered and distributed to course participants. The use and implementation of sensitivity analysis techniques to assess how sensitive conclusions are to violations of 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. Familiarity with linear and logistic regression will be required to fully benefit from the course.

VanderWeele is a professor in the departments of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He earned his PhD in 2006 at Harvard and has published more than 140 papers since. His methodological work concerns causal inference from observational data with a focus on methods for mediation, interaction, and spillover effects. He is an expert on mediation analysis and has published numerous papers on the topic and developed software to implement many of the techniques proposed in the literature. He teaches Methods for Mediation and Interaction at the Harvard School of Public Health and has a book, Explanation in Causal Inference: Methods for Mediation and Interaction, in press at Oxford University Press.