Mediation Analysis with Survival Outcomes: Accelerated Failure Time vs. Proportional Hazards Models.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Survival time is an important type of outcome variable in treatment research. Currently, limited guidance is available regarding performing mediation analyses with survival outcomes, which generally do not have normally distributed errors, and contain unobserved (censored) events. We present considerations for choosing an approach, using a comparison of semi-parametric proportional hazards (PH) and fully parametric accelerated failure time (AFT) approaches for illustration.

Method

We compare PH and AFT models and procedures in their integration into mediation models and review their ability to produce coefficients that estimate causal effects. Using simulation studies modeling Weibull-distributed survival times, we compare statistical properties of mediation analys

SUBMITTER: Gelfand LA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4811962 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature