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Related papers: Bounding Causes of Effects with Mediators

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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…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-31 Deshanee S. Wickramarachchi , Laura Huey Mien Lim , Baoluo Sun

In contrast to evaluating treatment effects, causal attribution analysis focuses on identifying the key factors responsible for an observed outcome. For two binary exposure variables and a binary outcome variable, researchers need to assess…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-21 Shanshan Luo , Wei Li , Xueli Wang , Shaojie Wei , Zhi Geng

Assessing the causal effects of interventions on ordinal outcomes is an important objective of many educational and behavioral studies. Under the potential outcomes framework, we can define causal effects as comparisons between the…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-04-06 Jiannan Lu , Peng Ding , Tirthankar Dasgupta

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-30 BaoLuo Sun , Ting Ye

Recent approaches to causal inference have focused on causal effects defined as contrasts between the distribution of counterfactual outcomes under hypothetical interventions on the nodes of a graphical model. In this article we develop…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-26 Iván Díaz

Causal mediation analysis usually requires strong assumptions, such as ignorability of the mediator, which may not hold in many social and scientific studies. Motivated by a multilevel randomized treatment experiment using functional…

Applications · Statistics 2017-07-11 Yi Zhao , Xi Luo

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-28 Leah Comment , Brent A. Coull , Corwin Zigler , Linda Valeri

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-18 Tue Herlau , Rasmus Larsen

Causal mediation analysis has been extended to estimate path-specific effects with multiple intermediate variables, isolating treatment effects through a mediator of interest while excluding pathways through its ancestors. Such analyses…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Yang Bai , Sihan Wu , Baoluo Sun , Yifan Cui

In causal inference, interference occurs when the treatment of one unit may affect the outcomes of other units. The goal of this work is to serve as a guide to the use of linear outcome modeling for estimating causal effects in settings…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-01 Eric Tong , Salvador V. Balkus

Although review papers on causal inference methods are now available, there is a lack of introductory overviews on what they can render and on the guiding criteria for choosing one particular method. This tutorial gives an overview in…

Emission control technologies installed on power plants are a key feature of many air pollution regulations in the US. While such regulations are predicated on the presumed relationships between emissions, ambient air pollution, and human…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-19 Chanmin Kim , Michael Daniels , Joseph Hogan , Christine Choirat , Corwin Zigler

We present two methods for bounding the probabilities of benefit and harm under unmeasured confounding. The first method computes the (upper or lower) bound of either probability as a function of the observed data distribution and two…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-08 Jose M. Peña

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-14 Richard Liu , Nicholas T. Williams , Kara E. Rudolph , Ivan Diaz

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-09-02 Judith J. Lok

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 study of disparities in the liver transplantation process may focus on quantifying causal effects, particularly the average, direct, or indirect effects of various social determinants of health on being listed as a candidate for…

In settings where units' outcomes are affected by others' treatments, there has been a proliferation of ways to quantify effects of treatments on outcomes, including via indirect exposure to other units' treatments. Here we consider two…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-10 Sahil Loomba , Dean Eckles

Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding…

We present new results on average causal effects in settings with unmeasured exposure-outcome confounding. Our results are motivated by a class of estimands, e.g., frequently of interest in medicine and public health, that are currently not…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-25 Lan Wen , Aaron L. Sarvet , Mats J. Stensrud