Biostatistics Seminar Series - Jing Cheng, MD, MS, PhD

Title: Mediation analysis for count and zero-inflated count dataAbstract: In health studies, the outcome is often a count or zero-inflated (ZI) count such as number of hospital admissions, number of emergency visits, number of complications, and number of decayed, missing and filled teeth (dmft) or surfaces (dmfs). Such outcomes with excessive zeros make analyses challenging. In this talk, I will introduce a series of statistical methods we developed for mediation analyses specifically for count or ZI count outcomes, with or without the sequential ignorability assumption. The mediation analyses will help researchers understand the underlying mechanism of the treatment and improve it in future studies. The methods will be illustrated with dental caries prevention trials.