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Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used to estimate causal effects from non-randomized data. A canonical example is a randomized trial with noncompliance, in which the randomized treatment assignment serves as an IV for the…
Many policy evaluations using instrumental variable (IV) methods include individuals who interact with each other, potentially violating the standard IV assumptions. This paper defines and partially identifies direct and spillover effects…
In situations with non-manipulable exposures, interventions can be targeted to shift the distribution of intermediate variables between exposure groups to define interventional disparity indirect effects. In this work, we present 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…
The natural indirect effect (NIE) and mediation proportion (MP) are two measures of primary interest in mediation analysis. The standard approach for estimating NIE and MP is through the product method, which involves a model for the…
Causal mediation analysis aims to estimate the natural direct and indirect effects under clearly specified assumptions. Traditional mediation analysis based on Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) relies on the absence of unmeasured causes of the…
Mediation analysis is an important tool for studying causal associations in biomedical and other scientific areas and has recently gained attention in microbiome studies. Using a microbiome study of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients, we…
We introduce a new instrumental variable (IV) estimator for heterogeneous treatment effects in the presence of endogeneity. Our estimator is based on double/debiased machine learning (DML) and uses efficient machine learning instruments…
In this paper, we discuss causal inference on the efficacy of a treatment or medication on a time-to-event outcome with competing risks. Although the treatment group can be randomized, there can be confoundings between the compliance and…
The instrumental variable (IV) design is a common approach to address hidden confounding bias. For validity, an IV must impact the outcome only through its association with the treatment. In addition, IV identification has required a…
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…
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…
Direct effect analyses usually require deciding whether a focal variable is a pre-exposure confounder or a post-exposure mediator. In observational studies, that distinction may be unclear because timing is measured coarsely or the variable…
Indirect experiments provide a valuable framework for estimating treatment effects in situations where conducting randomized control trials (RCTs) is impractical or unethical. Unlike RCTs, indirect experiments estimate treatment effects by…
When an exposure of interest is confounded by unmeasured factors, an instrumental variable (IV) can be used to identify and estimate certain causal contrasts. Identification of the marginal average treatment effect (ATE) from IVs relies on…
This paper proposes semi-instrumental variables (semi-IVs) as an alternative to instrumental variables (IVs) to identify the causal effect of a binary (or discrete) endogenous treatment. A semi-IV is a less restrictive form of instrument:…
Instrumental variable (IV) methods offer a valuable approach to account for outcome data missing not-at-random. A valid missing data instrument is a measured factor which (i) predicts the nonresponse process and (ii) is independent of the…
In mediation analysis, the effect of an exposure (or treatment) on an outcome variable is decomposed into two components: a direct effect, which pertains to an immediate influence of the exposure on the outcome, and an indirect effect,…
Decomposing a total causal effect into natural direct and indirect effects is central to revealing causal mechanisms. Conventional methods achieve the decomposition by specifying an outcome model as a linear function of the treatment, the…
Instrumental variables (IV) estimation suffers selection bias when the analysis conditions on the treatment. Judea Pearl's early graphical definition of instrumental variables explicitly prohibited conditioning on the treatment.…