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Environmental health studies are increasingly measuring endogenous omics data ($\boldsymbol{M}$) to study intermediary biological pathways by which an exogenous exposure ($\boldsymbol{A}$) affects a health outcome ($\boldsymbol{Y}$), given…
The most widely discussed methods for estimating the Average Causal Effect/Average Treatment Effect are those for intervention in discrete binary variables whose value represents intervention/non-intervention groups. On the other hand,…
The role of the microbiome in disease pathogenesis is an emerging field with strong evidence suggesting that dysbiosis is associated with precancerous and cancerous states. Microbiome data present substantial challenges for causal mediation…
Path-specific effects in mediation analysis provide a useful tool for fairness analysis, which is mostly based on nested counterfactuals. However, the dictum ``no causation without manipulation'' implies that path-specific effects might be…
Many open problems in machine learning are intrinsically related to causality, however, the use of causal analysis in machine learning is still in its early stage. Within a general reinforcement learning setting, we consider the problem of…
Causal mediation analysis is widely used to investigate how causal effects operate through specific pathways linking treatments or exposures to outcomes. Recently, \texttt{crumble} was developed to enable nonparametric estimation of several…
Informative cluster size (ICS) and informative subgroup size (ISS) can distort marginal association estimates when the number of observed units, or their distribution across outcome-defined categories, is related to the outcomes under…
This paper develops methods for estimating the natural direct and indirect effects in causal mediation analysis. The efficient influence function-based estimator (EIF-based estimator) and the inverse probability weighting estimator (IPW…
In some causal inference scenarios, the treatment variable is measured inaccurately, for instance in epidemiology or econometrics. Failure to correct for the effect of this measurement error can lead to biased causal effect estimates.…
Unscheduled treatment interruptions may lead to reduced quality of care in radiation therapy (RT). Identifying the RT prescription dose effects on the outcome of treatment interruptions, mediated through doses distributed into different…
Summary statistics of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) teach causal relationship between millions of genetic markers and tens and thousands of phenotypes. However, underlying biological mechanisms are yet to be elucidated. We can…
In experimental and observational data settings, researchers often have limited knowledge of the reasons for missing outcomes. To address this uncertainty, we propose bounds on causal effects for missing outcomes, accommodating the scenario…
This dissertation focuses on modern causal inference under uncertainty and data restrictions, with applications to neoadjuvant clinical trials, distributed data networks, and robust individualized decision making. In the first project, we…
Physical activity has long been shown to be associated with biological and physiological performance and risk of diseases. It is of great interest to assess whether the effect of an exposure or intervention on an outcome is mediated through…
The goal of mediation analysis is to study the effect of exposure on an outcome interceded by a mediator. Two simple hypotheses are tested: the effect of the exposure on the mediator, and the effect of the mediator on the outcome. When…
Matching is a commonly used causal inference study design in observational studies. Through matching on measured confounders between different treatment groups, valid randomization inferences can be conducted under the no unmeasured…
Mediation analysis has become an important tool in the behavioral sciences for investigating the role of intermediate variables that lie in the path between a randomized treatment and an outcome variable. The influence of the intermediate…
Mediation analysis for survival outcomes is challenging. Most existing methods quantify the treatment effect using the hazard ratio (HR) and attempt to decompose the HR into the direct effect of treatment plus an indirect, or mediated,…
Existing methods in estimating the mean outcome under a given dynamic treatment regime rely on intention-to-treat analyses which estimate the effect of following a certain dynamic treatment regime regardless of compliance behavior of…
Instrumental variable based estimation of a causal effect has emerged as a standard approach to mitigate confounding bias in the social sciences and epidemiology, where conducting randomized experiments can be too costly or impossible.…