medRCT: Causal mediation analysis estimating interventional effects mapped to a target trial in R

 

Summary

The R package medRCT for causal mediation analysis supports the estimation of interventional effects (VanderWeele, Vansteelandt, and Robins 2014), specifically interventional effects that are defined such that they map explicitly to a “target trial” (Hernán and Robins 2016), as recently proposed by Moreno-Betancur et al. (2021). In the target trial, the treatment strategies are specified to reflect hypothetical interventions targeting and thus shifting the joint distribution of the mediators. medRCT can accommodate any number of potentially correlated mediators, including mediators that are not of primary interest but that are intermediate (exposure-induced) mediator-outcome confounders.