Non-parametric efficient causal mediation with intermediate confounders
Abstract
Interventional effects for mediation analysis were proposed as a solution to the lack of identifiability of natural (in)direct effects in the presence of a mediator-outcome confounder affected by exposure. We present a theoretical and computational study of the properties of the interventional (in)direct effect estimands based on the efficient influence fucntion (EIF) in the non-parametric statistical model. We use the EIF to develop two asymptotically optimal, non-parametric estimators that leverage data-adaptive regression for estimation of the nuisance parameters: a one-step estimator and a targeted minimum loss estimator. A free and open source \texttt{R} package implementing our proposed estimators is made available on GitHub. We further present results establishing the conditions under which these estimators are consistent, multiply robust, -consistent and efficient. We illustrate the finite-sample performance of the estimators and corroborate our theoretical results in a simulation study. We also demonstrate the use of the estimators in our motivating application to elucidate the mechanisms behind the unintended harmful effects that a housing intervention had on adolescent girls' risk behavior.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1912.09936,
title = {Non-parametric efficient causal mediation with intermediate confounders},
author = {Iván Díaz and Nima S. Hejazi and Kara E. Rudolph and Mark J. van der Laan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.09936},
year = {2020}
}