Transporting stochastic direct and indirect effects to new populations

Abstract

Transported mediation effects may contribute to understanding how and why interventions may work differently when applied to new populations. However, we are not aware of any estimators for such effects. Thus, we propose several different estimators of transported stochastic direct and indirect effects: an inverse-probability of treatment stabilized weighted estimator, a doubly robust estimator that solves the estimating equation, and a doubly robust substitution estimator in the targeted minimum loss-based framework. We demonstrate their finite sample properties in a simulation study.