{"title":"Post-selection inference for high-dimensional mediation analysis with survival outcomes.","authors":"Tzu-Jung Huang, Zhonghua Liu, Ian W McKeague","doi":"10.1111/sjos.12770","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>It is of substantial scientific interest to detect mediators that lie in the causal pathway from an exposure to a survival outcome. However, with high-dimensional mediators, as often encountered in modern genomic data settings, there is a lack of powerful methods that can provide valid post-selection inference for the identified marginal mediation effect. To resolve this challenge, we develop a post-selection inference procedure for the maximally selected natural indirect effect using a semiparametric efficient influence function approach. To this end, we establish the asymptotic normality of a stabilized one-step estimator that takes the selection of the mediator into account. Simulation studies show that our proposed method has good empirical performance. We further apply our proposed approach to a lung cancer dataset and find multiple DNA methylation CpG sites that might mediate the effect of cigarette smoking on lung cancer survival.</p>","PeriodicalId":49567,"journal":{"name":"Scandinavian Journal of Statistics","volume":"52 2","pages":"756-776"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0000,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12369553/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Scandinavian Journal of Statistics","FirstCategoryId":"100","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1111/sjos.12770","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/2/9 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"STATISTICS & PROBABILITY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
It is of substantial scientific interest to detect mediators that lie in the causal pathway from an exposure to a survival outcome. However, with high-dimensional mediators, as often encountered in modern genomic data settings, there is a lack of powerful methods that can provide valid post-selection inference for the identified marginal mediation effect. To resolve this challenge, we develop a post-selection inference procedure for the maximally selected natural indirect effect using a semiparametric efficient influence function approach. To this end, we establish the asymptotic normality of a stabilized one-step estimator that takes the selection of the mediator into account. Simulation studies show that our proposed method has good empirical performance. We further apply our proposed approach to a lung cancer dataset and find multiple DNA methylation CpG sites that might mediate the effect of cigarette smoking on lung cancer survival.
期刊介绍:
The Scandinavian Journal of Statistics is internationally recognised as one of the leading statistical journals in the world. It was founded in 1974 by four Scandinavian statistical societies. Today more than eighty per cent of the manuscripts are submitted from outside Scandinavia.
It is an international journal devoted to reporting significant and innovative original contributions to statistical methodology, both theory and applications.
The journal specializes in statistical modelling showing particular appreciation of the underlying substantive research problems.
The emergence of specialized methods for analysing longitudinal and spatial data is just one example of an area of important methodological development in which the Scandinavian Journal of Statistics has a particular niche.