Estimating the natural indirect effect and the mediation proportion via the product method

Abstract: The natural indirect effect (NIE) and mediation proportion (MP) are two measures of primary interest in mediation analysis. The standard approach for estimating NIE and MP is through the product method, which involves a model for the outcome conditional on the mediator and exposure and another model describing the exposure-mediator relationship. The purpose of this article is to comprehensively develop and investigate the finite-sample performance of NIE and MP estimators via the product method. With four common data types, we propose closed-form interval estimators via the theory of estimating equations and multivariate delta method, and evaluate its empirical performance relative to the bootstrap approach. In addition, we have observed that the rare outcome assumption is frequently invoked to approximate the NIE and MP with a binary outcome, although this approximation may lead to non-negligible bias when the outcome is common. We therefore introduce the exact expressions for NIE and MP with a binary outcome without the rare outcome assumption and compare its performance with the approximate estimators. Based upon these theoretical developments and empirical studies, we offer several practical recommendations to inform practice. An R package mediateP is developed to implement the methods for point and variance estimation discussed in this paper.