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Related papers: An Interventionist Approach to Mediation Analysis

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In causal mediation studies that decompose an average treatment effect into a natural indirect effect (NIE) and a natural direct effect (NDE), examples of post-treatment confounding are abundant. Past research has generally considered it…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-26 Guanglei Hong , Fan Yang , Xu Qin

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-01-15 K. C. G. Chan , K. Imai , S. C. P. Yam , Z. Zhang

Among Judea Pearl's many contributions to Causality and Statistics, the graphical d-separation} criterion, the do-calculus and the mediation formula stand out. In this chapter we show that d-separation} provides direct insight into an…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-08-31 Ilya Shpitser , Thomas S. Richardson , James M. Robins

Unmeasured confounding, unethical exposure, and ill-defined interventions pose significant challenges to evaluating policy-relevant mediation estimands in medicine and public health. In observational studies involving harmful exposures, the…

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

Causal mediation analysis seeks to determine whether an independent variable affects a response variable directly or whether it does so indirectly, by way of a mediator. The existing statistical tests to determine the existence of an…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-28 John Kidd , Dan-Yu Lin

The aim of this paper is to extend the framework of causal inference, in particular as it has been developed by Judea Pearl, in order to model actions and identify their intended effects, in the direction opened by Elisabeth Anscombe. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-16 Dario Compagno

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-10-18 Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen , Ilya Shpitser

We introduce causal geodesy, a framework for studying the landscape of stochastic interventions that lie between the two extremes of performing no intervention, and performing a sharp intervention that sets an exposure equal to a specific…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-13 Kyle Schindl , Larry Wasserman

Decomposing an exposure effect on an outcome into separate natural indirect effects through multiple mediators requires strict assumptions, such as correctly postulating the causal structure of the mediators, and no unmeasured confounding…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-04 Wen Wei Loh , Beatrijs Moerkerke , Tom Loeys , Stijn Vansteelandt

This paper is concerned with graphical criteria that can be used to solve the problem of identifying casual effects from nonexperimental data in a causal Bayesian network structure, i.e., a directed acyclic graph that represents causal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-02 Yimin Huang , Marco Valtorta

Mediation analysis, which started with Baron and Kenny (1986), is used extensively by applied researchers. Indirect and direct effects are the part of a treatment effect that is mediated by a covariate and the part that is not. Subsequent…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-12-17 Judith J. Lok , Ronald J. Bosch

Standard methods for inference about direct and indirect effects require stringent no unmeasured confounding assumptions which often fail to hold in practice, particularly in observational studies. The goal of this paper is to introduce a…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-09-25 Isabel R. Fulcher , Ilya Shpitser , Stella Marealle , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-23 Marie S. Breum , Vanessa Didelez , Erin E. Gabriel , Michael C. Sachs

The path-specific effect (PSE) is of primary interest in mediation analysis when multiple intermediate variables between treatment and outcome are observed, as it can isolate the specific effect through each mediator, thus mitigating…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-16 Jiawei Shan , Ting Wang , Wei Li , Chunrong Ai

The weighted controlled direct effect (WCDE) generalizes the standard controlled direct effect (CDE) by averaging over the mediator distribution, providing a robust estimate when treatment effects vary across mediator levels. This makes the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-09 Ruiyang Lin , Yongyi Guo , Kyra Gan

We introduce a generalization of team semantics which provides a framework for manipulationist theories of causation based on structural equation models, such as Woodward's and Pearl's; our causal teams incorporate (partial or total)…

Logic · Mathematics 2018-05-15 Fausto Barbero , Gabriel Sandu

Causal mediation analyses investigate the mechanisms through which causes exert their effects, and are therefore central to scientific progress. The literature on the non-parametric definition and identification of mediational effects in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-13 Richard Liu , Nicholas T. Williams , Kara E. Rudolph , Iván Díaz

We discuss causal mediation analyses for survival data and propose a new approach based on the additive hazards model. The emphasis is on a dynamic point of view, that is, understanding how the direct and indirect effects develop over time.…

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

This paper provides robust estimators and efficient inference of causal effects involving multiple interacting mediators. Most existing works either impose a linear model assumption among the mediators or are restricted to handle…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-12 Haoyu Wei , Hengrui Cai , Chengchun Shi , Rui Song