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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…
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…
Understanding causal mechanisms in complex systems requires evaluating path-specific effects (PSEs) in multi-mediator models. Identification of PSEs traditionally relies on the demanding cross-world independence assumption. To relax this,…
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…
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…
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…
Analyses of causal mediation often involve exposure-induced confounders or, relatedly, multiple mediators. In such applications, researchers aim to estimate a variety of different quantities, including interventional direct and indirect…
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…
Many empirical studies estimate causal effects in environments where economic units interact through spatial or network connections. In such settings, outcomes are jointly determined, and treatment induced shocks propagate across…
The use of causal mediation analysis to evaluate the pathways by which an exposure affects an outcome is widespread in the social and biomedical sciences. Recent advances in this area have established formal conditions for identification…
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…
Political scientists are increasingly interested in assessing causal mechanisms, or determining not just if a causal effect exists but also why it occurs. Even so, many researchers avoid formal causal mediation analyses due to their…
Deciding on an appropriate intervention requires a causal model of a treatment, the outcome, and potential mediators. Causal mediation analysis lets us distinguish between direct and indirect effects of the intervention, but has mostly been…
Causal mediation analysis has historically been limited in two important ways: (i) a focus has traditionally been placed on binary treatments and static interventions, and (ii) direct and indirect effect decompositions have been pursued…
Mediation analysis allows one to use observational data to estimate the importance of each potential mediating pathway involved in the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome. However, current approaches to mediation analysis with…
The assumption that data samples are independent and identically distributed (iid) is standard in many areas of statistics and machine learning. Nevertheless, in some settings, such as social networks, infectious disease modeling, and…
Classical causal and statistical inference methods typically assume the observed data consists of independent realizations. However, in many applications this assumption is inappropriate due to a network of dependences between units in the…
When developing new interventions to minimize the harmful effects of an exposure, investigators usually target the mechanisms that mediate the causal effect of the exposure on the outcome. Predicting the causal effect of these new…
The incorporation of causal inference in mediation analysis has led to theoretical and methodological advancements -- effect definitions with causal interpretation, clarification of assumptions required for effect identification, and an…
While estimation of the marginal (total) causal effect of a point exposure on an outcome is arguably the most common objective of experimental and observational studies in the health and social sciences, in recent years, investigators have…