A Tutorial on Interaction

Abstract In this tutorial, we provide a broad introduction to the topic of interaction between the effects of exposures. We discuss interaction on both additive and multiplicative scales using risks, and we discuss their relation to statistical models (e.g. linear, log-linear, and logistic models). We discuss and evaluate arguments that have been made for using additive or multiplicative scales to assess interaction. We further discuss approaches to presenting interaction analyses, different mechanistic forms of interaction, when interaction is robust to unmeasured confounding, interaction for continuous outcomes, qualitative or “crossover” interactions, methods for attributing effects to interactions, case-only estimators of interaction, and power and sample size calculations for additive and multiplicative interaction.