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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…
Scientists regularly pose questions about treatment effects on outcomes conditional on a post-treatment event. However, causal inference in such settings requires care, even in perfectly executed randomized experiments. Recently, the…
Convenient access to observational data enables us to learn causal effects without randomized experiments. This research direction draws increasing attention in research areas such as economics, healthcare, and education. For example, we…
Causal mediation analysis is an important statistical method in social and medical studies, as it can provide insights about why an intervention works and inform the development of future interventions. Currently, most causal mediation…
Understanding causal mechanisms is crucial for explaining and generalizing empirical phenomena. Causal mediation analysis offers statistical techniques to quantify the mediation effects. Although numerous methods have been developed for…
Mediation analysis is a strategy for understanding the mechanisms by which treatments or interventions affect later outcomes. Mediation analysis is frequently applied in randomized trial settings, but typically assumes: a) that randomized…
In some causal inference scenarios, the treatment variable is measured inaccurately, for instance in epidemiology or econometrics. Failure to correct for the effect of this measurement error can lead to biased causal effect estimates.…
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…
Causal mediation analysis can improve understanding of the mechanisms underlying epidemiologic associations. However, the utility of natural direct and indirect effect estimation has been limited by the assumption of no confounder of the…
In experimental and observational data settings, researchers often have limited knowledge of the reasons for missing outcomes. To address this uncertainty, we propose bounds on causal effects for missing outcomes, accommodating the scenario…
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…
There have been numerous publications on the advantages and disadvantages of estimating natural (pure) effects compared to controlled effects. One of the main criticisms of natural effects is that it requires an additional assumption for…
This paper discusses the fundamental principles of causal inference - the area of statistics that estimates the effect of specific occurrences, treatments, interventions, and exposures on a given outcome from experimental and observational…
In experiments that study social phenomena, such as peer influence or herd immunity, the treatment of one unit may influence the outcomes of others. Such "interference between units" violates traditional approaches for causal inference, so…
Assessing causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding is challenging. Although auxiliary variables, such as instrumental variables, are commonly used to identify causal effects, they are often unavailable in practice due to…
One of the most fundamental problems in causal inference is the estimation of a causal effect when variables are confounded. This is difficult in an observational study, because one has no direct evidence that all confounders have been…
In social science researches, causal inference regarding peer effects often faces significant challenges due to homophily bias and contextual confounding. For example, unmeasured health conditions (e.g., influenza) and psychological states…
Given empirical evidence for the dependence of an outcome variable on an exposure variable, we can typically only provide bounds for the "probability of causation" in the case of an individual who has developed the outcome after being…
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…
E-commerce companies have a number of online products, such as organic search, sponsored search, and recommendation modules, to fulfill customer needs. Although each of these products provides a unique opportunity for users to interact with…