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Natural direct and indirect effects decompose the effect of a treatment into the part that is mediated by a covariate (the mediator) and the part that is not. Their definitions rely on the concept of outcomes under treatment with the…

In many medical studies, an ultimate failure event such as death is likely to be affected by the occurrence and timing of other intermediate clinical events. Both event times are subject to censoring by loss-to-follow-up but the nonterminal…

The increasing multiplicity of data sources offers exciting possibilities in estimating the effects of a treatment, intervention, or exposure, particularly if observational and experimental sources could be used simultaneously. Borrowing…

Causal mediation analysis is complicated with multiple effect definitions that require different sets of assumptions for identification. This paper provides a systematic explanation of such assumptions. We define five potential outcome…

Construction of just-in-time adaptive interventions, such as prompts delivered by mobile apps to promote and maintain behavioral change, requires knowledge about time-varying moderated effects to inform when and how we deliver intervention…

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…

Estimation of local average treatment effects in randomized trials typically requires an assumption known as the exclusion restriction in cases where we are unwilling to rule out unmeasured confounding. Under this assumption, any benefit…

Observational cohort data is an important source of information for understanding the causal effects of treatments on survival and the degree to which these effects are mediated through changes in disease-related risk factors. However,…

To estimate causal effects, analysts performing observational studies in health settings utilize several strategies to mitigate bias due to confounding by indication. There are two broad classes of approaches for these purposes: use of…

Analysis of observational studies increasingly confronts the challenge of determining which of a possibly high-dimensional set of available covariates are required to satisfy the assumption of ignorable treatment assignment for estimation…

Mediation analysis with contemporaneously observed multiple mediators is an important area of causal inference. Recent approaches for multiple mediators are often based on parametric models and thus may suffer from model misspecification.…

During the past few years, mediation analysis has gained increasing popularity across various research fields. The primary objective of mediation analysis is to examine the direct impact of exposure on outcome, as well as the indirect…

Causal graphs may inform covariate adjustment for estimating causal effects and improve estimation efficiency by exploiting the graphical structure. In many applications, however, the target causal parameter may not be point-identified due…

Bayesian causal inference offers a principled approach to policy evaluation of proposed interventions on mediators or time-varying exposures. We outline a general approach to the estimation of causal quantities for settings with…

In large observational studies, the case-cohort design is commonly used to reduce the cost associated with covariate measurement. For survival outcomes, literature has suggested that the restricted mean survival time (RMST) be a more…

Most causal inference methods focus on estimating marginal average treatment effects, but many important causal estimands depend on the joint distribution of potential outcomes, including the probability of causation and proportions…

Estimating a causal effect from observational data can be biased if we do not control for self-selection. This selection is based on confounding variables that affect the treatment assignment and the outcome. Propensity score methods aim to…

Instrumental variables are commonly used to estimate effects of a treatment afflicted by unmeasured confounding, and in practice instruments are often continuous (e.g., measures of distance, or treatment preference). However, available…

Experiments often include multiple treatments, with the primary goal to compare the causal effects of those treatments. This study focuses on comparing the causal anatomies of multiple treatments through the use of causal mediation…

Instrumental variable approaches have gained popularity for estimating causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounders. However, the availability of instrumental variables in the primary dataset is often challenged due to stringent…