Related papers: Estimation of natural indirect effects robust to u…
Causal mediation analysis provides techniques for defining and estimating effects that may be endowed with mechanistic interpretations. With many scientific investigations seeking to address mechanistic questions, causal direct and indirect…
A common concern when trying to draw causal inferences from observational data is that the measured covariates are insufficiently rich to account for all sources of confounding. In practice, many of the covariates may only be proxies of the…
It is often of interest to decompose a total effect of an exposure into the component that acts on the outcome through some mediator and the component that acts independently through other pathways. Said another way, we are interested in…
In causal mediation analysis, identification of existing causal direct or indirect effects requires untestable assumptions in which potential outcomes and potential mediators are independent. This paper defines a new causal direct and…
Natural direct and indirect effects are mediational estimands that decompose the average treatment effect and describe how outcomes would be affected by contrasting levels of a treatment through changes induced in mediator values (in the…
To estimate direct and indirect effects of an exposure on an outcome from observed data strong assumptions about unconfoundedness are required. Since these assumptions cannot be tested using the observed data, a mediation analysis should…
We present a method for assessing the sensitivity of the true causal effect to unmeasured confounding. The method requires the analyst to set two intuitive parameters. Otherwise, the method is assumption-free. The method returns an interval…
Mediation analysis is concerned with the decomposition of the total effect of an exposure on an outcome into the indirect effect through a given mediator, and the remaining direct effect. This is ideally done using longitudinal measurements…
Although the exposure can be randomly assigned in studies of mediation effects, any form of direct intervention on the mediator is often infeasible. As a result, unmeasured mediator-outcome confounding can seldom be ruled out. We propose…
Identification of standard mediated effects such as the natural indirect effect relies on heavy causal assumptions. By circumventing such assumptions, so-called randomized interventional indirect effects have gained popularity in the…
Controlled Direct Effect (CDE) is one of the causal estimands used to evaluate both exposure and mediation effects on an outcome. When there are unmeasured confounders existing between the mediator and the outcome, the ordinary…
Causal mediation analysis can improve understanding of the mechanisms underlying epidemiologic associations. However, the utility of natural direct and indirect effect estimation has been limited by the assumption of no confounder of the…
Several frameworks have been proposed for studying causal mediation analysis. What these frameworks have in common is that they all make assumptions for point identifications that can be violated even when treatment is randomized. When a…
Mediation analysis in causal inference has traditionally focused on binary exposures and deterministic interventions, and a decomposition of the average treatment effect in terms of direct and indirect effects. In this paper we present an…
Mediation analysis is widely used for investigating direct and indirect causal pathways through which an effect arises. However, many mediation analysis studies are challenged by missingness in the mediator and outcome. In general, when the…
An essential goal of program evaluation and scientific research is the investigation of causal mechanisms. Over the past several decades, causal mediation analysis has been used in medical and social sciences to decompose the treatment…
It is often of interest in the health and social sciences to investigate the joint mediation effects of multiple post-exposure mediating variables. Identification of such joint mediation effects generally require no unmeasured confounding…
Mediation analysis breaks down the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome into an indirect effect, acting through a third group of variables called mediators, and a direct effect, operating through other mechanisms. Mediation analysis…
With reference to a binary outcome and a binary mediator, we derive identification bounds for natural effects under a reduced set of assumptions. Specifically, no assumptions about confounding are made that involve the outcome; we only…
Causal mediation analysis is used to evaluate direct and indirect causal effects of a treatment on an outcome of interest through an intermediate variable or a mediator.It is difficult to identify the direct and indirect causal effects…