Adaptive PoC and JS Test: An Adaptive Method for Power Enhancement in Causal Mediation Analysis

Music City Center 

Mediation analysis plays a vital role in causal pathway studies which aim to determine whether the exposure variable affects the outcome through a third variable. Statistical tests for mediation analysis examine the presence of mediation effects, such as how the environment may impact one's behavior by influencing specific areas of the brain. However, traditional testing methods have been shown to be underpowered near the origin as they fail to specify the accurate null hypothesis, which is a combination of three different types. To fix this problem, we propose an adaptive test method by introducing an adaptive operator toward the original test statistic. Through both theoretical and simulation results, we will show that our method is able to control type I error properly while enhancing power compared to traditional test methods. A real data experiment based on the ABCD dataset will also be performed to demonstrate the improvement of our testing method.

Causal inference

Mediation analysis

Sobel test

Adaptive test 

Biometrics Section