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Causal Mediation In A Survival Setting With Time-Dependent Mediators, Wenjing Zheng, Mark J. Van Der Laan

Wenjing Zheng

The effect of an expsore on an outcome of interest is often mediated by intermediate variables. The goal of causal mediation analysis is to evaluate the role of these intermediate variables (mediators) in the causal effect of the exposure on the outcome. In this paper, we consider causal mediation of a baseline exposure on a survival (or time-to-event) outcome, when the mediator is time-dependent. The challenge in this setting lies in that the event process takes places jointly with the mediator process; in particular, the length of the mediator history depends on the survival time. As a result, we argue …