Testing for Mediation Effect with Application to Human Microbiome Data

Haixiang Zhang, Jun Chen, Zhigang Li and Lei Liu ()
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Haixiang Zhang: Tianjin University
Jun Chen: Mayo Clinic
Zhigang Li: University of Florida
Lei Liu: Washington University in St. Louis

Statistics in Biosciences, 2021, vol. 13, issue 2, No 7, 313-328

Abstract: Abstract Mediation analysis has been commonly used to study the effect of an exposure on an outcome through a mediator. In this paper, we are interested in exploring the mediation mechanism of microbiome, whose special features make the analysis challenging. We consider the isometric logratio transformation of the relative abundance as the mediator variable. Then, we present a de-biased Lasso estimate for the mediator of interest and derive its standard error estimator, which can be used to develop a test procedure for the interested mediation effect. Extensive simulation studies are conducted to assess the performance of our method. We apply the proposed approach to test the mediation effect of human gut microbiome between the dietary fiber intake and body mass index.

Keywords: Compositional mediators; High-dimensional data; Isometric logratio transformation; Joint significance test; Mediation analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s12561-019-09253-3

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