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We propose a novel approach for causal mediation analysis based on changes-in-changes assumptions restricting unobserved heterogeneity over time. This allows disentangling the causal effect of a binary treatment on a continuous outcome into…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-10-13 Martin Huber , Mark Schelker , Anthony Strittmatter

Influence function (IF)-based estimators are widely used in mediation analysis due to their modeling flexibility, but standard implementations require direct estimation of the distribution functions of the mediator and treatment variables.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-10 Chang Liu , AmirEmad Ghassami

When estimating causal effects, it is important to assess external validity, i.e., determine how useful a given study is to inform a practical question for a specific target population. One challenge is that the covariate distribution in…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-03 Zhenghao Zeng , Edward H. Kennedy , Lisa M. Bodnar , Ashley I. Naimi

Traditional mediation analysis typically examines the relations among an intervention, a time-invariant mediator, and a time-invariant outcome variable. Although there may be a direct effect of the intervention on the outcome, there is a…

Applications · Statistics 2020-08-28 Xizhen Cai , Donna L. Coffman , Megan E. Piper , Runze Li

We present methods for causally interpretable meta-analyses that combine information from multiple randomized trials to estimate potential (counterfactual) outcome means and average treatment effects in a target population. We consider…

Causal mediation analysis concerns the pathways through which a treatment affects an outcome. While most of the mediation literature focuses on settings with a single mediator, a flourishing line of research has examined settings involving…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-12 Xiang Zhou

We propose semi- and non-parametric methods to estimate conditional interventional effects in the setting of two discrete mediators whose causal ordering is unknown. Average interventional indirect effects have been shown to decompose an…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-19 Max Rubinstein , Zach Branson , Edward H. Kennedy

Causal mediation analysis examines causal pathways linking exposures to disease. The estimation of interventional effects, which are mediation estimands that overcome certain identifiability problems of natural effects, has been advanced…

Interventional effects have been proposed as a solution to the unidentifiability of natural (in)direct effects under mediator-outcome confounders affected by the exposure. Such confounders are an intrinsic characteristic of studies with…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-30 Iván Díaz , Nicholas Williams , Kara E. Rudolph

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

In cluster-randomized trials (CRTs), there is emerging interest in exploring the causal mechanism in which a cluster-level treatment affects the outcome through an intermediate outcome. The majority of existing causal mediation methods are…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-12 Chao Cheng , Fan Li

Causal effect estimation from observational data is one of the essential problems in causal inference. However, most estimation methods rely on the strong assumption that all confounders are observed, which is impractical and untestable in…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-14 Yubai Yuan , Annie Qu

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-01-18 Fei Gao , Fan Xia , Kwun Chuen Gary Chan

Imbalance in covariate distributions leads to biased estimates of causal effects. Weighting methods attempt to correct this imbalance but rely on specifying models for the treatment assignment mechanism, which is unknown in observational…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-13 Eric Dunipace

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…

Interference occurs when a unit's treatment (or exposure) affects another unit's outcome. In some settings, units may be grouped into clusters such that it is reasonable to assume that interference, if present, only occurs between…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-24 Chanhwa Lee , Donglin Zeng , Michael G. Hudgens

In many applications, researchers are interested in the direct and indirect causal effects of a treatment or exposure on an outcome of interest. Mediation analysis offers a rigorous framework for identifying and estimating these causal…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-10-08 Yizhen Xu , Numair Sani , AmirEmad Ghassami , Ilya Shpitser

Recent work has made important contributions in the development of causally-interpretable meta-analysis. These methods transport treatment effects estimated in a collection of randomized trials to a target population of interest. Ideally,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-08 Justin M. Clark , Kollin W. Rott , James S. Hodges , Jared D. Huling

Causal mediation analysis in cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) is complicated by the presence of multiple mediators, intracluster correlation, and within-cluster interference. Existing mediation methods often fall short in accommodating…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-14 Jiaqi Tong , Chao Cheng , Fan Li

We suggest double/debiased machine learning estimators of direct and indirect quantile treatment effects under a selection-on-observables assumption. This permits disentangling the causal effect of a binary treatment at a specific outcome…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-07-04 Yu-Chin Hsu , Martin Huber , Yu-Min Yen