Summary
This document is a technical report on causal mediation analysis, authored by Kristin MacDonald from StataCorp LLC, presented at the Canadian Stata Conference. The report outlines the integration of causal inference and mediation analysis to understand the effects of treatments on outcomes. It defines causal mediation analysis as a method that decomposes total effects into direct and indirect effects through mediators. The document details the use of Stata's mediate command for performing causal mediation analysis, providing examples that illustrate the application of this command in analyzing the impact of exercise on well-being through hormone levels. Additionally, it discusses traditional mediation analysis formulations and estimation methods, emphasizing the importance of causal diagrams in identifying causal effects. The report concludes with a workflow for causal inference that includes hypothetical modeling, causal effect identification, and parameter estimation.
